Hi. Since yesterday i selfhosted all my stuff with a raspberry pi and two odroids. Everything works ok, but after i read about a few apps that are not supported by the arm-architecture of the SBCs and about the advantages of the backup-solution in proxmox, i bought a little server (6500T/8GB/250GB) to try proxmox.
Installed proxmox, but now - before i install my first VM - i have a few questions:
a) What Linux OS do i take? Ubuntu Server?
b) Should it be headless?
The server is in the cellar of my house, so would there be any advantages of installing an OS with a GUI?
Usually it’s handy to have a display during initial setup and cfg. Also, with x windows port forwarding … you access your server gui over a network like god intended :)
In proxmox, especially if you are running a bunch of services (and not virtual desktops) it much better to set up an automated way of creating a cloud-init template.
You can run the script every now and then to download an updated image, load up some sensible defaults, then create a template of the VM.
After that, you just clone the template, resize drives, tweak hardware settings, adjust any cloud-init settings, then boot the VM.
It takes a while to sort out the script, after which you get consistent up-to-date cloud-init enabled templates.
Then it’s like 2 minutes to clone and configure a VM from proxmox’s web-gui.
And you always get consistent ready-to-go VMs.
You can even do it via CLI, so you could ansible/terraform the whole process
For sure.
My point was more … first time, ever, you boot a raw device, a display can be handy unless you know what you are doing. Once it survives a reboot…
After that, if you need a GUI — just run an x windows server on your main rig interact with your remote server as the client without the need of a display.