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by mtlynch 2051 days ago
Thanks for reading!

>How did you go about picking the software?

I wanted to go with something that was pretty mainstream. I don't care that much about cutting edge features, and I'm more interested in a mature product that I don't have to tinker much with. My experience with Kimchi made me more cautious about taking a chance on smaller projects.

I keep wanting to like ESXi and not really enjoying it. I had a hard time scripting things with ESXi, and certain things seemed to require performing actions in the GUI. I can't remember at this point where the gap was, but I wasn't ever able to figure out how to clone a template and boot it up via CLI, whereas I found it easy to do that with Proxmox.

>How do you end up managing using the same VMs? Do you have a template and you clone the template? Or do you have a way of just running both a template VM and an application VM, and have the app VM use the template VM for most of it's OS level needs.

Yeah, I just have one pre-configured Ubuntu 20.04 template VM, and I clone that whenever I need a new VM. Occasionally, I'll boot up the template just to update its packages and tweak anything. I do all my VM management with Ansible, so there's a standard set of scripts that update and configure the machine whenever I clone a new one.

>If you end up having 10 VMs, how do you properly update?

I sometimes use Ansible to update everything, but honestly I get behind on updates. I wouldn't do that with an Internet-facing server, but none of these VMs are accessible outside my local network, so there's not really much attack surface.