New Project Time
Playing with Incus on a Raspberry PI and attempting to get a Samba DC setup were fun but I’m losing interest for infrastructure on ARM devices. I was pretty excited to learn about Oracle Cloud’s extensive Always-free Tier, but when I realized the 4 cpu, 24 gig ram was only for Ampere ARM architecture, it put a damper on some of my ideas. I spent an afternoon trying to deploy ApisCP to a set of free tier servers only to be met with error after error until I realized aarch64 is not supported by ApisCP. That experience after my recent Samba failure took the wind out of my sails.
I’ve decided it’s time to roll back the hard-mode projects and do something a little easier. I currently have Gen 8 HP DL360P with Proxmox that hosts a home grown VDI solution (Fedora workstations), some MS infrastructure VMs, and an NGINX container. Once upon a time I had converted my gaming desktop into a second Proxmox node and put a Proxmox external voter in the cloud so I could live migrate VMs from my super old server to my decent desktop. I had no reason to this, but I did. I followed up by passing through my video card to a Windows 11 VM so I could still use my new “Proxmox desktop” as a gaming computer. I don’t have a write up for that one, but it might be fun to do again. Or… I could try something new.
It’s been a few years since my first Proxmox install so I don’t remember it well, but I do remember my second go at it on new hardware and at that time I tried out a newly branded XEN solution, XCP-ng. It did not go well. I went back to Proxmox because it was functional, comfortable, and more mature, which was strange considering Xen has been around longer than KVM. A cursory search tells me Citrix decided to do corporate things around 2018 and the community took all their opensource code home and revived a previously abandoned XCP, as a new opensource project called XCP-ng.
In any case, I must have tried to install during that transition period and decided that the heartache wasn’t worth it and got up and running with Proxmox instead. Today I’ve decided that I’m going to take my desktop and turn it into a Xenserver instead. Wish me luck!