Selfhosted

I'm running Kube on baremetal.

Obviously, you host your own hypervisor on own or rented bare metal.

My file server is also the container/VM host. It does NAS duties while containers/VMs do the other services.

OPNsense is its own box because I prefer to separate it for security reasons.

Pihole is on its own RPi because that was easier to setup. I might move that functionality to the AdGuard plugin on OPNsense.

Mainly that I don't understand how to use containers... or VMs that well... I have and old MyCloud NAS and little pucky PC that I wanted to run simple QoL services on... HomeAssistant, JellyFin etc...

I got Proxmox installed on it, I can access it.... I don't know what the fuck I'm doing... There was a website that allowed you to just run scripts on shell to install a lot of things... but now none of those work becuase it says my version of Proxmox is wrong (when it's not?)... so those don't work....

And at least VMs are easy(ish) to understand. Fake computer with OS... easy. I've built PCs before, I get it..... Containers just never want to work, or I don't understand wtf to do to make them work.

I wanted to run a Zulip or Rocket.chat for internal messaging around the house (wife and I both work at home, kid does home/virtualschool).... wanted to use a container because a service that simple doesn't feel like it needs a whole VM..... but it won't work...

It depends on the service and the desired level of it stack.

I generally will run services directly on things like a raspberry pi because VMs and containers offer added complexity that isn't really suitable for the task.

At work, I run services in docker in VMs because the benefits far outweigh the complexity.

All I have is Minecraft and a discord bot so I don't think it justifies vms

Well, that is how I started out. Docker was not around yet (or not mainstream enough, maybe). So it is basically a legacy thing.

My main machine is a Frankenstein monster by now, so I am gradually moving. But since the days when I started out, time has become a scarce resource, so the process is painfully slow.

This reminds me of a question I saw a couple years ago. It was basically why would you stick with bare metal over running Proxmox with a single VM.

It kinda stuck with me and since then I've reimaged some of my bare metal servers with exactly that. It just makes backup and restore/snapshots so much easier. It's also really convenient to have a web interface to manage the computer

Probably doesn't work for everyone but it works for me

Here’s my homelab journey: https://bower.sh/homelab

Basically, containers and GPU is annoying to deal with, GPU pass through to a VM is even more annoying. Most modern hobbyist GPUs also do not support splitting your GPU. At the end of the day, it’s a bunch of tinkering which is valuable if that’s your goal. I learned what I wanted, now I’m back to arch running everything with systemd and quadlet

KISS

The more complicated the machine the more chances for failure.

Remote management plus bare metal just works, it's very simple, and you get the maximum out of the hardware.

Depending on your use case that could be very important

Depends on the application. My NAS is bare metal. That box does exactly one thing and one thing only, and it's something that is trivial to setup and maintain.

Nextcloud is running in docker (AIO image) on bare metal (Proxmox OS) to balance performance with ease of maintenance. Backups go to the NAS.

Everything else is running on in a VM which makes backups and restores simpler for me.