Hello everyone! During one of those illuminated evenings, I got the idea to move my small server in Scaleway to some more powerful server in Hetzner. If I will make the move, I am thinking of splitting the server in various VMs, to host different services that belongs to different trust boundaries, for example:

  • A Lemmy/writefreely instance
  • Vaultwarden/Gitea
  • Wireguard tunnel to my home infrastructure
  • Blogs, and other convenience services

In order to achieve the best level of separation, I was thinking of using VMs. My default choice would be Proxmox, because I used it in the past, and because I generally trust it, however I am trying to evaluate multiple options, and maybe someone has good or better experiences to share.

Other options I thought about are:

  • Run everything in Docker. I am going to do this nevertheless, but Docker escapes are always possible, especially with public facing images that I did not write myself and/or that require a host volume.
  • KVM directly? I am OK even without a GUI to be honest. I am not aware if there is some ansible module or even better Terraform provider for this, it would be great. (EDIT: I found https://registry.terraform.io/providers/dmacvicar/libvirt/0.7.1 which seems awesome!)
  • ESxi? I have no experience with this solution.

Any idea or recommendation?

  • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Personally, after looking at what the industry wants; I would start my homelab trying to automate it with Ansible/Terraform. libvirt should be decent, and if you want to go over to BSD, I think ansible supports bhyve? If not, libvirt definitely runs on BSD so you could just automate that

    • sudneo@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I work in security, so there is no really devops/sysadmin prospect for me. That said, I use ansible and (mostly) terraform professionally and for my lab, so that’s a good idea nevertheless. I don’t have much BSD experience, what do you think are the key reasons to go that route instead of Linux?

      • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        For me, it’s a personal decision. I find BSD more cohesive. That is subjective and has been debated for a decade now. I also find bhyve a bit easier to use, albiet the features are newer and more in number in KVM (for example: bhyve until very recently didn’t have VirtIO drivers, so Windows machines would be useless on it).

        I’m interested in working in Security myself. Would you be able to tell me a little more about your work? Also, what role/path in security would you recommend for a Cloud admin/System Admin?

        • sudneo@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Would you be able to tell me a little more about your work? Also, what role/path in security would you recommend for a Cloud admin/System Admin?

          Well, I started as an IT ops person, I got lucky before the first job was still in a fairly modern environment, and I got introduced to k8s, containers and linux administration (we were running k8s on baremetal). Slowly I moved more and more towards security, specifically infrastructure/platform security, which to be honest, is not too far from a regular Cloud/System admin. However, the big difference is in mindset and priorities, which slide from availability to mostly confidentiality and integrity. My job essentially consists on supporting the security of whatever Kubernetes cluster we run, both managed and on baremetal, with the usual spinkle of network security in the middle, and a strong focus in secure computation (i.e., container security). The actual work can range from research and experimentation, to concrete setup or development of new tooling, to developing standards and guidelines.

          (Cloud) Security Engineering seems an obvious path for a cloud/system admin, and I don’t think it’s extremely hard to build the necessary security knowledge on top of a solid engineering background!

  • nothingbutlove@lemmyonline.comEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    In the places where I’ve had to make similar decisions, I’ve used the need for ‘advanced’ features to make the call. If I’m looking for storage or networking redundancy, or I’ve been interested in running multiple hosts systems, or I’ve been looking to play with overlay networks, then I’ll grab Ovirt, Proxmox, VSphere, or Openstack (depending). When I just want something simple-ish, I just KVM / Podman on a Linux machine.

    • sudneo@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Good point, I don’t have any advanced use case, except maybe some slightly more complex network setup. Probably this is achievable with KVM too (and/or some firewall-fu). I would like to have fully IaC, so I don’t have to click through guis, so the availability of Terraform providers might be a dealbreaker (which I didn’t look yet for Proxmox, for example).

    • sudneo@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Do you use just plain bash to script it? I saw that there is a Terraform provider and that looks actually interesting to me basically similar functionality to proxmox, but less software.

      • vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        Not parent commenter, but I use ansible + plain bash scripts/virsh/XML definitions to manage my libvirt instances/“cluster”, it just works.

        I have been running Proxmox on the side/at work, I like it as well but never took the time to dive in the API/automation side of things. libvirt is simpler but still powerful.

        • sudneo@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          Oh right, there is the XML aspect that I didn’t consider.

          I have to say that I very much have a preference for the declarative terraform strategy vs ansible, and I saw that the libvirt terraform provider is quite mature. I have seen that there are even some providers for proxmox (but less mature in my opinion), so it seems that either way the machine definition could be codified and automated. But the thing is, if the machines are all in Terraform code, basically there is no much use of proxmox (metrics are going to be in node exporter, maybe just backups and snapshots?).

          • vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Ansible can be declarative if you do it right, and take the time to write a few roles to manage your use case. For example my ansible libvirt config looks like this:

            libvirt_vms:
  - name: front.example.org
    xml_file: '{{ playbook_dir }}/data/libvirt/front.example.org.xml'
    autostart: no
  - name: home.example.org
    xml_file: "{{ playbook_dir }}/data/libvirt/home.example.org.xml"
    state: running

libvirt_port_forwards:
  - vm_name: front.example.org
    vm_ip: 10.10.10.225
    vm_bridge: virbr1
    dnat:
      - host_interface: eth0
        host_port: 22225 # SSH
        vm_port: 22
      - host_interface: eth0
        host_port: 19225 # netdata
        vm_port: 19999

libvirt_networks:
  - name: home
    mac_address: "52:52:10:ae:0c:cd"
    forward_dev: "eth0"
    bridge_name: "virbr1"
    ip_address: "10.10.10.1"
    netmask: "255.255.255.0"
    autostart: yes
    state: active

            This is the only config I ever touch since the role handles changing configuration, running/stopping VMs, networks, etc. transparently. For initial provisioning I have a shell script that wraps around virsh/virt-install/virt-sysprep to setup a new VM in ~1 minute (It uses a preseed file, which is similar to what cloud-init offers). This part could be better integrated with ansible. Terraform has other advanced features such as managing hosts on cloud providers, but I don’t need those at the moment. If I ever do, I think I would still use ansible to run terraform deployments [1]

            Edit: the libvirt role if you’re curious