[PVE-User] smallest proxmox footprint?

[Thomas Lamprecht]

Hi,

On 11/16/2017 05:52 PM, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> Greetings All,
> 
> I am actually researching various hypervisors for a project that I am
> trying to coordinate to move forward and have narrowed it down to:
> 
> 1. SmartOS (Illumos-based, via OpenSolaris) -- this is a wonderful
> hypervisor, but does not support PCI pass-through. It does have zones, kvm,
> ZFS, and a bunch of other solid performance factors as well as having a
> relatively small footprint of just a couple hundred MB in size. Not sure if
> it will support NoMachine NX or X2GO.
> 

I do not have experience with SmartOS so leaving this other community
members, which may have played with it.

> 2. Proxmox (Debian-based, if I read correctly) -- this is also a really
> good hypervisor which does support PCI pass-through, seems to have great
> performance as well, and also will support NoMachine NX or X2GO.
> 
> I am wanting to see what could be the smallest estimated footprint that
> Proxmox might be able to attain as smaller is better for my project.
> 

Could you be a tad more specific with footprint here?
Is it disk space, memory, CPU usage?
Assuming it's memory then you may even slim down PVE a bit, e.g., stop and
disable the high availability pve-ha-crm and pve-ha-lrm services,
the pvesr.timer (storage replication) if you do not use this features.
There may be others which are also OK do be disable for you, depends on
your setup and usage.

> Also, I am wondering if it might be possible to add a very small XServer to
> proxmox as well as I would typically like to try and run NoMachine NX, or
> X2GO perhaps in a container and pass through the video, audio, etc... if
> possible as opposed to running a separate machine for Proxmox and one for
> the client.
> 

I'm using Proxmox VE as my developer workstation, with X11, it works
wonderfully for me. I'm using i3, a very low footprint but still full
featured tiling window manager. dwm would be even smaller, so it may
be worth looking at it, if small is what you seek. You could also use
a plain X11 server, but a minimal window manager does not have much
overhead and its convenience may out weight the one it has. 

I do not have a login manager, meaning I boot into the a basic Linux tty,
log in there and then execute `startx`, with my ~/.xinitrc containing:

numlockx &
xbindkeys
exec /usr/bin/i3

This results in quite a slimmed down system, when compared to a KDE, GNOME
or similar desktop environment.

> Basically, I am investigating a way to incorporate a small GUI remote
> client into proxmox on the same local machine that is running.
> 

As setting up Proxmox VE really fast I'd suggest to just try it out and
see if it holds up to your expectation. IMO your usecase should be
dooable quite fine.

cheers,
Thomas