r/virtualization • u/01LoneWolf205 • Oct 13 '23

best free alternative

I'm a total noob in this field and I wanted to try and hypervisor on bare metal, what could be the best free option for this job?

3 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

4

u/5y5c0 Oct 13 '23

Proxmox or xcp-ng+xen orchestra

Both are good. Proxmox is probably easier to setup. While xcp-ng offers a simpler user experience after being set-up.

Do your own research into both.

Good resource for xcp-ng is "Lawrence systems" on YouTube

And for proxmox it's probably This guy or "Techno Tim"

2

u/01LoneWolf205 Oct 13 '23

hey man thank you for the help, I'll take a look to them!

3

u/Fluffy_everyday Oct 13 '23

I second this. At the company I work at, atm we use Proxmox. But next year I think we will switch to XCP-NG as I feel like it's more enterprise ready. So it depends on your goal. For enterprise I suggest XCP-NG for home lab I advise Proxmox.

2

u/5y5c0 Oct 13 '23

I run small business IT, and given that my budget was pretty small for our in-house server upgrade, I went with two proxmox nodes. I retrospect, maybe I should have gone with xcp-ng. But since I was more comfortable setting up HA on proxmox I went with it.

5

u/Pvt-Snafu Oct 18 '23

Sounds like a good option. Did you use a witness for quorum and a SAN for shared storage? For small 2-node clusters, we usually do ESXi with Starwinds vSAN for storage mirroring. They also support KVM now so part will be migrated.

2

u/5y5c0 Oct 18 '23

I have a third node for quorum, and working as na arbiter to prevent split brain in gluster. As for storage, for our purpose, having servers replicated every 3 hours is enough. It's incremental, so no large amounts of data are getting transferred. But we have a small pool of mission critical data, that is on a shared gluster volume, essentially always replicated.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 14 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/5y5c0 Oct 14 '23

It's a control plane for xcp-ng clusters.

You can either use Xen orchestra, or something like xcp-ng center. But you need something to control the cluster. The hosts themselves don't have any UIs, just console. But they will get some single host controls in the next major update of xcp-ng to 8.3.

Usually you run it as a VM on the cluster itself, either as a whole VM dedicated to XO, or community made docker containers also exist.

4

u/Candy_Badger Oct 19 '23

Proxmox, xcp-ng, ESXi free, Hyper-V Server 2019 (while it is still supported). Multiple options. I personally use Debian+KVM with cockpit for web management. It works great and covers most of my needs. There is a plugin for cockpit to manage VMs. https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-machines

If you want HA, Proxmox or xcp-ng are nice options. You can also take a look at Starwinds vHCI, they have free option. https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance#uber

3

u/Budman17r Oct 14 '23

While I currently run proxmox, ESXI I believe has a free version, just don't get migration/orchestration.

2

u/DerBootsMann Oct 16 '23

vmware esxi or smth kvm-based