Upgrading to PROXMOX - A Real Home Server OS

i know i just did a video on my home server setup and software that's running on it but since then i've actually made a major change to what's running on that server gone is the windows 10 base operating system and what's replaced it is actually proxmox now what is proxmox and why did i change to it let's find out [Music] so what is proxmox proxmox is a linux-based operating system that acts as a dedicated hypervisor so while windows 10 is you know your generic you know all around good to have operating system proxmox is built specifically for those users in a home server setup or even an enterprise server setup so why did i switch from windows 10 to proxmox well there's no real good answer i wasn't really doing much gaming on that server anymore and i've seen a lot of comments of people pointing me directly to hypervisor operating systems over windows and upon doing some research i came across a few channels like techno tim and craft computing who are both running proxmox and make it look like a lot more fun than just running something like windows so i went for it i'm going to cut to the chase and say that i am extremely happy with this change proxmox has been a lot of fun to work with gives you a lot more flexibility in what you can do it makes the whole home server experience a lot more enjoyable so what i'm going to do is go through my pros and cons of my switch from windows to proxmox and let you guys make a decision if that's something that you may want to do okay the pros number one there is much less overhead when using a dedicated hypervisor like proxmox proxmox has designed specifically to run vms and storage solutions whereas windows 10 is your generic operating system that's built for basically everybody so in windows 10 there's gonna be a lot of services and programs that are gonna be running in the background that have nothing to do with your hypervisor setup that you may be running on your home server so that's gonna eat up a lot of your resources that you know you you really would like to have back and dedicated to your vms or storage solutions so proxmox eliminates a lot of that because it has one job function as hypervisor so it eliminates a lot of those unnecessary services and uses your hardware much more efficiently pro number two proxmox can actually function as a nas on your home network it has built-in zfs support which is an extremely popular protocol zfs has a good combination of speed redundancy and efficiency so anytime where you can use zfs as your main storage solution i definitely recommend going with it another pro is that proxmox offers extremely easy backup solutions now before when i was running windows 10 i was using virtualbox and while virtualbox does have backups it can be extremely cumbersome to figure out um their snapshot kind of format and how to roll back and get the right thing that you wanted in case of a you know failure proxmox on the other hand you can set timed backups whether you want that you know multiple times a day once a week once a month it'll back up your entire vm to a dedicated drive that you specify and it's extremely easy to recover that i've done it before with a couple of dms that i was testing on and happened to blow up so i simply went to the drive where all my backups were stored clicked restore and within 30 seconds i had my old vm up and running extremely easy to use i've had zero problems with their backup feature another pro and probably the main one that i heard from users when i was running a home server on windows 10 was the pci passthrough function so proxmox will actually allow you to pass through an entire pci device directly to a vm so this was not available in windows 10 running virtualbox so any vm i had running i couldn't pass through any of the physical pci devices that i had plugged into that machine whereas on proxmox i can take an entire graphics card and pass that through to a windows vm and i'm actually doing that because uh the hump server is still sitting in the living room area next to a big screen tv so i'd still like to use it for gaming so i do have a windows 10 vm with a gt 1030 pass through so that i can you know at least run some easy to run games now this is a double-edged sword because if you were using your home server for gaming like i was when i had you know my vr setup it's much easier to run games on a dedicated windows 10 machine rather than go through the entire process of passing through pci devices because while proxmox does offer that feature and i have gotten it working pretty well it can be kind of a pain and you may have to find a few guides and make some tweaks before you can get it working perfectly in your scenario another pro is that proxmox is built directly on top of linux so if you're familiar with linux then you'll be right at home using proxmox and you can interact with your server directly from the terminal if that's what you're most familiar with now again this is a double edged sword and i'll get to that when i go over my cons but as you'll see and as i've said before i'm extremely happy with proxmox so the pros are definitely gonna outweigh the commas now here let me mention some of the things i listed as neutral i have no strong feelings one way or the other meaning that there was no real change between using my windows 10 machine uh with virtualbox versus changing the proxmox in both scenarios you can set up as many virtual machines as your hardware will allow this kind of ties into the next neutral and that it's pretty easy on both systems to allocate resources as you see fit for your virtual machines so if you want one virtual machine to have two cores and four gigs of ram with a 50 gigabyte hard drive you can do that if you want one machine to have 32 cores and 128 gigabytes of ram and a one terabyte hard drive you can do it uh both systems are extremely easy to allocate your resources and make sure your vms have the setups that you see fit and ls neutral is kind of more of a pro for proxmox i put down that they're both free because well technically windows 10 isn't free a lot of people will use that as their base operating system and then virtualbox itself is free but proxmox you can get 99 of the functionality for free there are paid tiers for enterprise users but the main thing that that's getting you outside of the free tier is that it allows dedicated enterprise updates from proxmox's dedicated repository that you don't get on the free tier but that's not really a functionality that i would knock um from being on a free tier so they're both free ish okay let's move to the cons and i kind of alluded to the first one before uh with the pass-throughs where if you're going to be using your home server for gaming and that's going to be one of your main priorities i would stick with windows 10 because it's kind of a pain to get gpu pass-through set up depending on what your setup is now it's a lot easier with an intel based processor due to most of them having integrated graphics now i was running a ryzen processor which doesn't have dedicated graphics and while it's possible to pass through a gpu on a ryzen system it i could not get it to work without adding another gpu for the hosts to see as its primary output so what i did was i just threw an old gt710 in there so that the host would recognize that and use it allowing me to pass through the second graphics card which was my gt 1030 to my gaming virtual machine and the second and kind of last con that i've seen builds upon the previous pro of it being built on top of linux now most of you know that linux is open source and you can do basically whatever you see fit within your operating system now that's awesome because it gives you tons of flexibility and allows you to customize features in any way you see fit but it's also easy to get yourself in trouble so with all that power comes lots of responsibility now i was actually messing around with proxmox on one of my old machines before making the big change on my actual home server and i definitely started going into the weeds a little too far and outside of my comfort zone and actually bricked the system so i did have to do a clean install of proxmox so that was kind of a lesson to learn not to venture too far out of my comfort zone and be a little bit more careful but i've since learned my lesson and approach everything much more carefully now so that's kind of all i had in terms of pros and cons with my setup like i said i'm extremely happy with proxmox and i've seen a lot of people doing really cool things with it i know i've barely scratched the surface of what's possible on it but i am learning and while proxmox is definitely here to stay my home server actually is not i do have an upgrade coming and let's just say it's pretty epic so be on the lookout for that video because after i'm done filming this i'm actually going to be migrating everything from my current home server to my new setup and you won't want to miss that this server is pretty awesome so if you saw something in this video that you'd like me to go a little bit more in detail about definitely drop a comment below if there's any of you out there that are currently using proxmox and there's some cool feature that you know you swear by drop a comment below i'd love to hear how you guys are using proxmox i'm open to ideas i have an overkill server that i need to utilize uh to justify spending way too much money on it but if you like this video be sure to drop a like below if you loved it subscribe so you're notified the next time we post something awesome see you on the next one [Music] you

Channel: Raid Owl

Views: 9,578

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Id: u26ZGIOwgfU

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021