Selfhosted

40152 readers

1112 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
awesome-selfhosted software
awesome-sysadmin resources
Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Recommendations for running VMs on a headless server? (feddit.uk)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Quick overview of my setup: Synology NAS running a whole bunch of Docker containers and a couple of full blown VMs, and an N100 based mini PC running Ubuntu Server for those containers that benefit from hardware acceleration.

On the NAS I have a Linux Mint VM that I use for various desktoppy things, but performance via RDP or NoMachine and so on is just bad. I think it's ultimately due to the lack of acceleration, so I'd like to try running it from the mini PC instead but I'm struggling to find hypervisor options.

VirtualBox can be done headless, apparently, but the package installed via Apt wants to install X/Wayland and the entire desktop experience. LXC looks like it might be a viable option with its web frontend but it appears to be conflicting with Docker atm and won't run the setup.

Another option is to redo the machine with UnRaid or TrueNAS Scale but as they're designed to be full fledged NAS OSes I don't love that idea.

So what would you do? Does anyone have a similar setup with advice?

Thanks all!

Edit: Thanks for everyone's comments. I still can't get LXC to work, which is a shame because it has a nice web frontend, so I'll give KVM a go as my next option. Failing that I might well backup my Docker volumes, blat the whole thing and see what Proxmox can do.

Edit 2: Webtop looks to be exactly what I was looking for. Thanks again for everyone's help and suggestions.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

You're overthinking this. You don't need an actual VM for services. Containers are fine. If you're worried about security, go down the Katanor gvisor rabbithole, but you definitely don't need an entire OS and VM running for simple services.

There's no reason containers can't be hardware accelerated. I'm confused by what that statement means.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm using plenty of containers, accelerated and otherwise, but I also want a full-blown desktop that I can access from wherever. Even on a wired LAN, streaming that desktop is slow and laggy when it's hosted on my NAS, which I think is due to the lack of hardware acceleration on that system. I want to move the VM to a host that has that feature (currently running Ubuntu Server) but I need a hypervisor that doesn't require its own desktop system to be installed in order to manage it.

Plenty of good replies here to help me though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Give webtop a try? Granted I haven’t tried anything heavy on it, but it’s been performant enough for me. Here’s a compose file if it stays formatted correctly:

services:
  webtop:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/webtop:latest # alpine - xfce
    # other tags with different bases and desktops: https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-webtop
    container_name: webtop
    #security_opt:
    #  - seccomp:unconfined #optional
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=America/Los_Angeles
      - TITLE=my_desktop #optional
    volumes:
      - config:/config
      #- /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock #optional
    ports:
      - 3000:3000
      - 3001:3001
    restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
  config: {}
networks: {}

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Mind officially blown! I've just spun up a Debian KDE instance and it's running beautifully. Exactly what I wanted, thank you!