[PVE-User] smallest proxmox footprint?

[Lonnie Cumberland]

Greetings,

Thanks for the wonderful replies on this post.

Actually, this is an experiment in minimalism.


> > 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.
>
>
Sorry for not being clear on this footprint idea.  Actually, I am looking
at the minimal disk (boot CD) footprint and was playing with the idea of a
type of "ram-based live-cd" with FS mount mapping in the drives for VM
storage, and a few other essential directories like home, root, etc..
mostly persistent data directories.  The idea was to have the absolute
smallest proxmox cd/usb boot footprint and have the drives for user/VM data.



> > 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.
>
>
This might be interesting as I actually never hear of the i3 wm before but
it looks a lot like the "terminator" console which I installed on Ubuntu
16.04 that has similar functionality.

For this sub-project, and although some in the community may not see a need
for which I do have a very specific use case in mind and potential follow
on growth model.

I just what to have proxmox running and then have a very simple X-Server to
service just one application (NoMachine NX client or X2GO client perhaps)
that comes up on boot. Ideally, it would be good if I could somehow run the
X-Server in a VM perhaps and pass-through to the video so as not to add
more components to the hypervisor base, but if that is not possible then
adding the X-Server and remote client to be base could work for now.

> 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.
>

I have actually set up the base Proxmox VE on 4 LAN systems and 2 VPS
systems that I was initially playing around with to see if I could cluster
LAN nodes across the WAN to the VPS nodes just to see if it could be done
easily but further wanted to set up a self-balancing VPN like Tinc, or
MeshBird to do it. Never got it all to work together smoothly so now I am
looking at another direction for a second project to test and will come
back to the clustering sub-project stuff a bit later once this part is
working as it is also related to the first one in just being another part
of the same master project. Both projects will come together at some point.


Thanks again and have a great day,
Lonnie