Honestly kinda tempted to just stop using a Proxmox cluster.

The Web UI and whatever is nice, but it's just not my thing.

Now that I have zero Windows in my house, it might be better to just run regular Linux on them with libvirtd ontop. Then manage them all from my desktop or laptop using virt-manager

The advantages is that there would be a far less complicated virtualization stack, that I have better control over, and servers are managed with a proper native client rather than some Web UI.

The drawback would be that I lose the clustering features, such as automatic config sync, shared block storage via LVM (at least without risk) and automatic recovery of virtual machines if one host dies.

If I want to switch, my chance is when I get the third server.

Because then I can set it up with libvirt, migrate virutal machines there from the Proxmox cluster, and once everything is on the third host, I can shut down my Proxmox machines and reinstall them with Linux+libvirt, and spread servers back out again afterwards.

I dunno man, having a web client is a bit nice since it lets me easily manage stuff from my Winblows machine at work.

And web ui barely matters when I connect to VMs over SPICE using remote-viewer anyways. Backups and High Availability are also automated with Proxmox. Not to mention that you can add LVM storage like iSCSI and Proxmox just handles making sure there's no collisions on storage that would cause corruption.

If using Libvirt it'd simplify the setup but I'd have to write scripts to do backups, and I'd pretty much give up on HA and storage management.

@quad For me, Proxmox is basically LXC and KVM with a nice web UI on top. I use the web UI rarely, but you can do anything KVM and LXC can do, with zero issues. I even automated some stuff via Ansible and it's a bliss. I don't see what benefit would it have to give up on the web UI, despite using it rarely. I mean, it's not like the web UI is a resource hog anyway.

What I miss, honestly, is nftables support, as Proxmox is still on iptables. But it's not that critical, I can wait.

@L1Cafe I want to give up on Proxmox because when excluding power outages, I’ve only had virtual machines fail because services named “pve*” died.

It’s not a common occurrence but for example in December the pvesr service decided to die on a host and VMs were restarted on another.

pvesr stayed broken until I reinstalled the whole machine and rejoined it into the cluster. And I dunno why because all storage was perfectly functional when checking it via command line. NFS for backups worked fine and LVM over iSCSI showed up fine with lv commands.

Outside of power outages, all virtual machine downtime on my cluster has been caused by services failing whose names all start with “pve”

@L1Cafe the cluster resource manager broke once too and that sure was fun

@L1Cafe Most the issues would probably be solved if I just didn't cluster Proxmox, but then it's kind of moot because I can't manage both hosts in the same interface and I'd have to use something like virsh to migrate VMs.

At that point it'd be better to just use virt-manager rather than a Web UI

@quad That's odd. I've never experienced those issues, then again I don't cluster Proxmox at all. In my previous job I used to, and it worked relatively fine, but it was a little painful to manage it all.

@L1Cafe Yeah I used Proxmox 4/5 for years without issue. But once I started clustering with Proxmox 5/6 it's been a bit of a pain. My current cluster has been going since around late summer last year and I've had four incidents where a node stopped working or the whole cluster did. One of the cases was a power outage, the three other cases were pve-services that broke