Tools

Those are tools that I’m using for hosting my home lab.

Proxmox

Proxmox

This a bare metal hypervisor - in simple terms, it’s an OS, in which you can deploy VM’s, and this is the main purpose of that OS. It’s also an alternative to VMware ESXi/vSphere.

I’m using it to keep multiple different OS running on single server. In my case Linux/Windows.

First time setup

As far as i know - first VM, from which there will be an template created needs to be initiated manually.

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Terraform

Terraform

It’s#iaac primarily made for deploying VM’s in cloud, but there are extensions called providers, which allow to use it for Proxmox VM’s management:

• telmate
• bpg This tool will help to automate VM creation based on existing templates.

There is Terraform VSCode extension, which helps with synatx, and provides a Language Server: HashiCorp Terraform

Proxmox provider base config:

terraform {
	required_version = ">= 0.14"
	required_providers {
		proxmox = {
			source = "telmate/proxmox"
			version = ">= 1.0.0"
		}
	}
}
	
provider "proxmox" {
	pm_tls_insecure = true
	pm_api_url = "https://proxmox.domain/api2/json"
	pm_api_token_secret = "this is a secret"
	pm_api_token_id "this is a token api id generated in proxmox"
}

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Ansible

Ansible

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Podman

Podman

It’s container alternative for Docker, I’ve used Docker for few years, and wanted to see what Podman is about. Keypoints that brough my attention are:

• Deamon-less architecture, so containers are under user starting them.
• Root-less first approach - by default containers don’t have root privileges.
• I’m not using swarm, and lack of it is not a problem.

Keypoints based on

Imaginary Cloud - Podman vs Docker Redhat Developers - 3 adantages of Podman over Docker - This is by Red Hat, so might be considered an Ad, as Podman is their product.

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