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Ask HN: Best Home Server for Virtualization

3 points by fcoury ↗ HN
I have a rather powerful computer that I have been using as my main driver up until now, and I recently got an M1 Mac Mini.

I would like to repurpose this old computer to run VMs. My workflow nowadays mostly includes building Docker and Kubernetes, and even though I can build them on the M1 using dockerx it's very slow.

What I am looking for is a way to create a local server on this computer that would allow me to spin up large VMs to run my docker build but I would also like to be able to spin up other OSes like Windows 11, macOS and even different Linux flavors.

What would you recommend for such a server nowadays?

9 comments

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rbanffy
I’m using an Ubuntu server with KVM VMs. I manage them from my laptop using virt-manager.
atatatat
Check out unraid.

Also check out not using keybase...they're owned by...well, you'll figure it out.

swozey
I just set up Unraid and it's so, so much more than I expected it to be. I had no idea it had this whole docker app ecosystem. I thought it was just some big NFS drive pool share server.

I replaced Proxmox with it but I haven't done any VFIO virtualization with it yet as it's running on older hardware whereas my Proxmox was running on a ryzen w/ dual RTXs. I'll probably keep my Proxmox disk around but I am so impressed with Unraid. I'm doing the Unraid Argo tunnel from Ibracorps guide (https://ibracorp.io/).

ElCapitanMarkla
Do you do any gaming with those dual RTXs? I like to have the odd game of CS but have heard it can be a hassle with anti cheat measures flagging the VM etc.
swozey
Sorry I missed this. I don't play CS but there are definitely games that trigger anti-cheat if you play in a VM. I think games with Easy AntiCheat are the main culprits. I play a game called Conquerors Blade that kicks me out immediately if I login to a server. I don't know of EAC is more common with FPS games (it seems so) but I don't play many FPS. I'd say 90% of the 20-30 games I played over vfio worked without any hassle but it's mostly casual strategy games like Banished, Rimworld, etc. Where if you cheat nobody is affected.

I do think there's a bigger performance hit than people mention though. One of my other fav games is Chivalry 2 and I swear I was getting half the FPS in it over vfio but maybe I just needed to tweak more. I'm on a 49" monitor so my numbers are skewed as hell anyway, my rtx can't push 3460/1080 that well.

FWIW I got tired of "tweaking" and just reinstalled Windows on my gaming desktop and now I just use a 2nd older desktop with Unraid.

My real goal of this server was to run linux 24/7 but boot into Windows or OSX whenever I needed it, but I refuse to pay $500 for an AMD card to let me run OSX so I kinda gave up on the whole idea. Now I'm just going to buy a 14" MB now that they're not terrible.

Check on /r/vfio for counterstrike talk, it's a great sub.

cpach
I’ve heard good things about Proxmox VE: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve
Cyph0n
Proxmox is excellent. I have a headless machine running a bunch of VMs with GPU passthrough on Proxmox and it has been chugging along with no issues.
ElCapitanMarkla
I’ve been playing with this on a vm over the weekend. I’m going to bite the bullet and run it natively this weekend
denton-scratch
I use Xen, with a Debian Dom0. You can provision a new VM in about a minute.

The commandline tools are not very obvious, and they have scores of subcommands. But it's all scriptable, so you can easily have a CI system spin-up and tear-down VMs. You can hot-copy a VM from one physical machine to another, which is neat for maintenance. It's super-lightweight, but I'd say Xen is a bit nerdy for many people.