Also the mentions and requirements relating AI in the article sound like they are from another world. Did things really come to this? Even if they had, you one can still snapshot proxmox vms as well as host (zfs).

Roughly ten years ago, my homelab consisted of a dozen virtual machines running on SmartOS. I was not familiar with Illumos, and this was before it had a widely available web UI, but it was simple enough to use that these challenges didn't matter much. SmartOS was designed to boot reliably from USB flash storage, allowed me to use all my SATA ports for VM storage, and was my first "immutable" operating system. The primary focus on ZFS storage was another great quality of SmartOS.

Two moves and several years later, it was time to rebuild the lab, and I decided to go with Proxmox because it had decent ZFS support. Experience with Proxmox has been very good too. The GUI, many more virtualization features (in addition to the key ones I care about), and better hardware support through the Linux kernel have kept me on Proxmox for a long time.

Customizing my Proxmox installation always gave me anxiety. How could I defend my hypervisor from configuration drift? I wished there could be an immutable version of Proxmox.

Later on, I learned about govulcheck, which offers a novel dynamic/static analysis hybrid approach to vulnerability management. Nothing else out there does this (without teaming up with some huge company). I began to think that I should favor software solutions based on golang.

Ultimately, Incus (and IncusOS) fit this need very well. My IncusOS hosts excellent and I'm glad I can run Incus itself on most Linux distros - including NixOS!

I'll keep a small Proxmox host around for experimenting with new kernel features (Intel GVT-g / SR-IOV graphics) and old operating systems like Windows XP or anything else that needs special QEMU options.

CLI is first class in proxmox, I use the qm command for managing vms all the time. The networking is also just a file in `/etc/network/interfaces` that I modify with vim as needed.

Also, do they get PBS using ZFS snapshots? Do they get HA, live migration, shared storage, easy CephOS, easy snapshots, quick cloning? Do you really want to migrate a VM from one node to another using the command line when you're in some serious situation?

Sure, for a homelab this might be OK, but the UI does make things easy for a reason.and it's not a gimmick.

I agree on a lot of the points, though, I just set up a second cluster and it took over 3 work days because of how much repetitive work is needed to do so. To be able to just take a file with instructions, adjust it a bit and deploy would be so much easier.

I searched the documentation but it wasn't really clear what its live migration and ZFS migration story is, but when I asked Claude to research it, it tells me that it supports live migration via ZFS snapshot replication, which is exactly what I'm looking for. I implemented a ganeti storage driver that does the same thing and am just getting ready to start testing it, but if Incus supports it I might look at moving that direction.

Anyone use Incus live migration with ZFS?

Uhh, whut? It provides a button-y interface, but you can do everything via config files and `pct` on the command line if you prefer. I know that’s not full nix-style declarative, but you don’t have to mislead to sell me on the advantages of declarative infra.

Oh man, you buried the lede there.

I switched over to NixOS around a month ago from Ubuntu and it's been just a dream. I expected there to be some friction with installing things that aren't already built for NixOS, but honestly it's been easier with LLM+NixOS than it was with Ubuntu.

edit: Thinko

One of the developers building Sylve gave a talk last year [2].

[1]: https://sylve.io/

[2]: https://youtu.be/wo4oD5UON30

You lost me there!!

Firstly, NixOS is hype, like everything being moved to Rust and failing miserably.

Secondly, "AI ... can .... safely modify my infrastructure", OP is either being a troll or haven't seem how the whole IT world is upside down because of those very same statements.

Thirdly, "my entire infrastructure is defined in text files", you clearly never heard of Ansible.

All my Proxmox LXC containers from DNS servers, to NGINX firewall aliases feeding OPNSense firewall rules, from Forgejo hosting my repos to PostgreSQL database, from Semaphore running my Ansible playbooks on schedule to *Arr collection, everything is fully infrastructure as code, there is no GUI.

I do not log into Proxmox to deploy my stuff, I enjoy CLI and Ansible makes everything like a walk in the park. I use Proxmox CLI tool "pct" for everything, even snapshots are CLI via "vzdump" and its config file.

My take from that post and comments resume in "hype" "not understanding processes" "seeing problems where there isn't one"

I only run Linux here, even my 3D printer runs Debian Netinst Linux. I am missing something here.

I did abandon TrueNAS, however. It really is a locked-down appliance. Good luck installing custom software on the base OS. I have a domain-joined Ubuntu/ZFS box that inherits a lot of policy from FreeIPA and/or Ansible config that is all backed by files on disk. It's been really easy to orchestrate what many would consider overkill in my homelab because literally everything is represented in a single Github repo.

I yanked vmfactory out and into a standalone repo if anyone is interested: https://github.com/whalesalad/vmfactory