LinuxFest Northwest 2018: Proxmox Hypervisor   Open Source Lxc And Kvm Management
Channel: linuxfestnorthwest
Date: 2018-04-30

Richard Clark

Proxmox Hypervisor - Rich open source LXC and KVM hypervisor manager - Homelab to Enterprise

From their website :

    Proxmox VE is a complete open-source platform for enterprise virtualization. With the built-in web interface you can easily manage VMs and containers, software-defined storage and networking, high-availability clustering, and multiple out-of-the-box tools on a single solution.

I am not affiliated with Proxmox in any way – I am just a fan that has used it for over 6 years now, and think that others should consider it for their use.

As an alternative to an OpenStack or ESX platform, Proxmox provides an open source Hypervisor manager with a rich enterprise feature set. It has been around for years, always based off of Debian, and started with KVM and OpenVZ style container management.

All the features are available out of the box, not locked behind an enterprise version, so this makes it great for the homelab user as you have an easy to deploy system to manage various types of containers, and can grow out with various shared storage technologies and clustering baked right in.

I will go over the install of Proxmox on top of an existing Debian instance, covering various use cases and features of Proxmox, and how I use it in my home lab environment for running a Kubernetes clusters, Virtual pfSense routers, Email servers, etc. all the way to Windows instances used for Selenium Grid tests on IE and Edge to Video Game servers for my kids.

Sometimes you can't run what you want in a docker container :)

If time permits I will do a demo of adding Proxmox to a Debian 9 machine, getting a KVM and LXC virtual machine installed, and doing various management actions against them.