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Comment by jsmthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

If you find yourself impacted by these changes in your home lab (and chances are you will; taking ballooning out of Free is nothing but petty), keep in mind that you can follow the lead of the major hosting companies and jump ship to KVM via oVirt or some homebrew. KVM is better in a number of ways anyway, one of them being a lack of control by Citrix, not to mention when Linode switched they got ~30% more perf out of Linodes.

Xen has been dying for a while. EC2 is heading off it, and they've held out the longest. This change is evidence that Citrix would like to accelerate that trend by killing off the home lab users that stuck it out (read: me). Looks like I have a new Christmas project.

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/01/7-ways-we-harde...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/aws_writes_new_kvm_...

https://blog.linode.com/2015/06/16/linode-turns-12-heres-som...

https://www.digitalocean.com/help/technical/general/ (Cmd+F KVM)

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I always prefer KVM in the limited VPS needs I have. It always seems a lot more flexible and less expensive to have a single larger instance in which I can nest my own VMs and spin up as needed. Of course Docker might obviate the requirement for nestability, but I havent used Docker much, and have a certain comfort level with pre build VMs Ive created for various stock purposes.

Nested virt is coming... :-)

Which Linux distro do you recommend for running KVM? Additionally, SmartOS has good support for running KVM virtual machines [1]. It gives good solid stability and integration with ZFS, not sure of the performance though vs Linux. The main downside of SmartOS is somewhat sporadic hardware support (broadcom nic's out, intel nic's in). I prefer SmartOS now where I can, but knowing which Linux distro is useful especially for GPU support.

1: https://www.joyent.com/blog/why-smartos-kvm-dtrace-zones-and...

For home - https://www.proxmox.com/

Nice simple web GUI.

Nice article from someone who setup a home data lab with Proxmox [1]. Do you use the WebUI to manage ZFS datasets?

1: https://medium.com/@MARatsimbazafy/journey-to-deep-learning-...

I recently moved my homelab to NixOS, since it lets me use the same system to manage the hosts and the guests declaratively.

I wrote up my approach at [1], in case you're curious.

1: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Virtualization_in_NixOS

This is great! Thanks! What an excellent use of NixOS.

Interesting approach! When/if you update a KVM instance, does it recreate it?

No, the contents of the instances are managed by a separate NixOps network, since it would be wasteful to send the full image (~1GB) for each instance each time a package is updated.

The purpose of the base image is to preinstall something that's ready for NixOps to "take over" with whatever I actually want to run on the VM.

I use KVM on Debian, but does it matter? KVM is distro agnostic.

The management tools are not.

The management tools along with the stability of the overall system. Debian might be a good choice for stability. Though it seems Redhat (maybe CentOS?) has a good lead on much of the KVM enterprise tools.

Or just use VMWare. They have had a free edition forever, with less limitations year over year.

as someone notes above, all Xen versions (including enterprise) are OSS so you can build and run them without paying for commercial support. the packages are just the supported, pre-built, “easy” path

VMWare has very little OSS, especially for their equivalents of Xen server. Id support KVM and co before VMWare just on those grounds alone

EDIT: clarity

The equivalent of Xen is ESX. It's been the gold standard for virtualization for a while and there is a free edition for as long as it existed.

Couldn't care less about open source. I'll prefer something that's free and works perfectly without hesitation.

Until the changes announced in this blog post there were features in the free version of Xen that did not exist in the free version of ESXi (like live migration of hosts - without shared storage!)

You need dedicated supported hardware though.

oVirt 4.2 just came out and it looks great! (OpenSource of RedHat Enterprise Virtualization)

oVirt is great, but if you’re doing single node deployments in a homelab ESXi is my first recommendation. oVirt can’t put the only host available in a cluster in maintenance mode, just like vCenter - so it’s an exercise in frustration trying to update anything without it freaking out.

But if you’ve got multiple hosts oVirt is great.

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