Obviously, you host your own hypervisor on own or rented bare metal.
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
151 points (93.6% liked)
Selfhosted
56262 readers
957 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
-
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I'm running Kube on baremetal.
Mainly that I don't understand how to use containers... or VMs that well... I have and old MyCloud NAS and little pucky PC that I wanted to run simple QoL services on... HomeAssistant, JellyFin etc...
I got Proxmox installed on it, I can access it.... I don't know what the fuck I'm doing... There was a website that allowed you to just run scripts on shell to install a lot of things... but now none of those work becuase it says my version of Proxmox is wrong (when it's not?)... so those don't work....
And at least VMs are easy(ish) to understand. Fake computer with OS... easy. I've built PCs before, I get it..... Containers just never want to work, or I don't understand wtf to do to make them work.
I wanted to run a Zulip or Rocket.chat for internal messaging around the house (wife and I both work at home, kid does home/virtualschool).... wanted to use a container because a service that simple doesn't feel like it needs a whole VM..... but it won't work...
load more comments
(4 replies)
It depends on the service and the desired level of it stack.
I generally will run services directly on things like a raspberry pi because VMs and containers offer added complexity that isn't really suitable for the task.
At work, I run services in docker in VMs because the benefits far outweigh the complexity.
All I have is Minecraft and a discord bot so I don't think it justifies vms
Well, that is how I started out. Docker was not around yet (or not mainstream enough, maybe). So it is basically a legacy thing.
My main machine is a Frankenstein monster by now, so I am gradually moving. But since the days when I started out, time has become a scarce resource, so the process is painfully slow.
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
Here’s my homelab journey: https://bower.sh/homelab
Basically, containers and GPU is annoying to deal with, GPU pass through to a VM is even more annoying. Most modern hobbyist GPUs also do not support splitting your GPU. At the end of the day, it’s a bunch of tinkering which is valuable if that’s your goal. I learned what I wanted, now I’m back to arch running everything with systemd and quadlet
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.