Selfhosted

It's just another system to maintain, another link in the chain that can fail.

I run all my services on my personal gaming pc.

Warms me heart to see people in this thread thinking for themselves and not doing something just because other people are.

I run my NAS and Home Assistant on bare metal.

• NAS: OMV on a Mac mini with a separate drive case
• Home Assistant: HAOS on a Lenovo M710q, since 1) it has a USB zigbee adapter and 2) HAOS on bare metal is more flexible

Both of those are much easier to manage on bare metal. Everything else runs virtualized on my Proxmox cluster, whether it's Docker stacks on a dedicated VM, an application that I want to run separately in an LXC, or something heavier in its own VM.

I've not cracked the docker nut yet. I don't get how I backup my containers and their data. I would also need to transfer my Plex database into its container while switching from windows to Linux, I love Linux but haven't figured out these two things yet

I have a single micro itx htpc/media server/nas in my bedroom. Why use containers?

For me it's lack of understanding usually. I haven't sat down and really learned what docker is/does. And when I tried to use it once I ended up with errors (thankfully they all seemed contained by the docker) but I just haven't gotten around to looking more into than seeing suggestions to install say Pihole in it. Pretty sure I installed Pihole outside of one. Jellyfin outside, copyparty outside, and I something else im forgetting at the moment.

I was thinking of installing a chat app in one, but I put off that project because I got busy at work and it's not something I normally use.

I guess I just haven't been forced to see the upsides yet. But am always wanting to learn

@kiol I mean, I use both. If something has a Debian package and is well-maintained, I'll happily use that. For example, prosody is packaged nicely, there's no need for a container there. I also don't want to upgrade to the latest version all the time. Or Dovecot, which just had a nasty cache bug in the latest version that allows people to view other peoples' mailboxes. Since I'm still on Debian 12 on my mail server, I remain unaffected and I can let the bugs be shaken out before I upgrade.

I don't host on containers because I used to do OS security for a while.

TrueNAS is on bare metal has I have a dedicated NAS machine that's not doing everything else and also is not recommended to virtualize. Not sure if that counts.

Same for the firewall (opnsense) since it is it's own machine.

I generally abstract to docker anything I don't want to bother with and just have it work.

If I'm working on something that requires lots of back and forth syncing between host and container, I'll run that on bare metal and have it talk to things in docker.

Ie: working on an app or a website or something in language of choice on framework of choice, but postgres and redis are living in docker. Just the app I'm messing with and it's direct dependencies run outside.

I would always run proxmox to set up docker VMs.

I found Talos Linux, which is a dedicated distro for kubernetes. Which aligned with my desire to learn k8s.
It was great. I ran it as bare-metal on a 3 node cluster. I learned a lot, I got my project complete, everything went fine.
I will use Talos Linux again.
However next time, I'm running proxmox with 2 VMs per node - 3 talos control VMs and 3 talos worker VMs.
I imagine running 6 servers with Talos is the way to go. Running them hyperconverged was a massive pain. Separating control plane and data/worker plane (or whatever it is) makes sense - it's the way k8s is designed.
It wasn't the hardware that had issues, but various workloads. And being able to restart or wipe a control node or a worker node would've made things so much easier.

Also, why wouldn't I run proxmox?
Overhead is minimal, get nice overview, get a nice UI, and I get snapshots and backups

What are you doing running your vms on bare metal? Time is a flat circle.

Anything you want dedicated performance on or require fine tuning for a specific performance use cases. Theyre out there.

There’s one thing I’m hosting on bare metal, a WebDAV server. I’m running it on the host because it uses PAM for authentication, and that doesn’t work in a container.

My servers and NAS were created long before Docker was a thing, and as I am running them on a rolling release distribution there never was a reason to change anything. It works perfectly fine the way it is, and it will most likely run perfectly fine the next 10+ years too.

Well I am planning, when I find the time to research a good successor, to replace my aging HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 that I use as Homeserver/NAS. Maybe I will then setup everything clean and migrate the services to docker/podman/whatever is fancy then. But most likely I will only transfer all the disks and keep the old system running on newer hardware. Life is short...

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

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