Selfhosted

I'm doing this on a couple of machines. Only running NFS, Plex (looking at a Jellyfin migration soon), Home Assistant, LibreNMS and some really small other stuff. Not using VMs or LXC due to low-end hardware (pi and older tiny pc). Not using containers due to lack of experience with it and a little discomfort with the central daemon model of Docker, running containers built by people I don't know.

The migration path I'm working on for myself is changing to Podman quadlets for rootless, more isolation between containers, and the benefits of management and updates via Systemd. So far my testing for that migration has been slow due to other projects. I'll probably get it rolling on Debian 13 soon.

I'm running a TrueNAS server on bare metal with a handful of hard drives. I have virtualized it in the past, but meh, I'm also using TrueNAS's internal features to host a jellyfin server and a couple of other easy to deploy containers.

I thought about running something like proxmox, but everything is too pooled, too specialized, or proxmox doesn't provide the packages I want to use.

Just went with arch as the host OS and firejail or lxc any processes i want contained.

my two bare metal servers are the file server and music server. I have other services in a pi cluster.

file server because I can't think of why I would need to use a container.

the music software is proprietary and requires additional complications to get it to work properly...or at all, in a container. it also does not like sharing resources and is CPU heavy when playing to multiple sources.

if either of these machines die, a temporary replacement can be sourced very easily(e.g. the back of my server closet) and recreated from backups while I purchase new or fix/rebuild the broken one.

IMO the only reliable method for containers is a cluster because if you're running several containers on a device and it fails you've lost several services.

I'm selfhosting Forgejo and i don't really see the benefit of migrating to a container, i can easily install and update it via the package manager so what benefit does containerization give?

My file server is also the container/VM host. It does NAS duties while containers/VMs do the other services.

OPNsense is its own box because I prefer to separate it for security reasons.

Pihole is on its own RPi because that was easier to setup. I might move that functionality to the AdGuard plugin on OPNsense.

I'm running Kube on baremetal.

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

Pure bare metal is crazy to me. I run proxmox and mount my storage there, and from there it is shared to machines that need it. It would be convenient to do a pass through to TrueNAS, for some of the functions it provides but I don’t trust that my skills for that. I’d have kept TrueNAS on bare metal, but I need so little horsepower for my services that it would be a waste. I don’t think the trade offs of having TrueNAS run my virtualisation environment were really worth it.

My router is bare metal. It’s much simpler to handle the networking with a single physical device like that. Again, it would be convenient to set up opnsense in a VM for failover. but it introduces a bunch of complexity I don’t want or really need. The router typically goes down only for maintenance, not because it crashed or something. I don’t have redundant power or ISPs either.

To me, docker is an abstraction layer I don’t need. VMs are good enough, and proxmox does a good job with LXCs so far.

Why would I spin up a VM and virtual network within that vm and then a container when I can just spin up a VM?

I’ve not spent time learning Docker or k8s; it seems very much a tool designed for a scale that most companies don’t operate at let alone my home lab.

After many failures, I eventually landed on OMV + Docker. It has a plugin that puts the Docker management into a web UI and for the few simple services I need, it’s very straightforward to maintain. I don’t cloud host because I want complete control of my data and I keep an automatic incremental backup alongside a physically disconnected one that I manually update.

KISS

The more complicated the machine the more chances for failure.

Remote management plus bare metal just works, it's very simple, and you get the maximum out of the hardware.

Depending on your use case that could be very important