{"id":159,"date":"2024-05-07T23:03:47","date_gmt":"2024-05-08T05:03:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.redshirt1701.com\/?p=159"},"modified":"2024-05-27T13:31:30","modified_gmt":"2024-05-27T19:31:30","slug":"pimox-proxmox-should-be-running-on-your-pi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.redshirt1701.com\/index.php\/2024\/05\/07\/pimox-proxmox-should-be-running-on-your-pi\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Run Proxmox VE \/ Pimox on a Raspberry Pi"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

May 7th, 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyone with a pi 4b or pi 5\u00a0 with 4gb or 8gb of ram should use Proxmox \/ Pimox or at least play with it once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a person with a 90% raspberry pi home lab, I’m here to say that the flexibility Virtual Machines offer is worth the effort to setup a Pimox node or two and a external share \/ NAS, even for a 4gb pi.\u00a0 Pimox is an arm based port of Proxmox VE, a leading virtualization platform for computers on x86 chipsets. https:\/\/www.proxmox.com\/en\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Virtual Machines<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Virtual Machines are computers that run inside other computers.\u00a0 I’ll leave the detailed explanation to others<\/a>. Suffice to say, with virtual machines you can do cool things that you can’t do with a normal computer, or raspberry pi. Depending on RAM, compute power and the needs of a VM, You can put multiple services on a single the pi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Many VMs Fit on a Raspberry Pi?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On an 8 gb raspberry pi, I have nginx, pihole, unbound and portainer running in a docker container. I also have 2 ubuntu servers, each running a wordpress site on the same raspberry pi. I basically have what I would have put on 3 Raspberry Pies running on a single 8 gb pi. The big use case is for multiple services \/ servers that aren’t very intensive. Multiple full desktops, even linux desktops, don’t do very well as VMs on a Raspberry Pi \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I said earlier, if the services are lightweight and don’t use a lot of ram or compute power, I can get 2 or 3 VMs running.\u00a0 On these servers you can run WordPress, docker & plex, etc. just like you would on a regular raspberry pi.\u00a0 You can also run full ARM64 distributions, i.e. flavors of Ubuntu or Debian, server and desktop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why Do it?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

First for the fun of it.\u00a0 It’s fun to learn, setup and use.\u00a0 There are many benefits of the virtualization, the abstraction of the hardware layer.\u00a0 Think Docker but old school.\u00a0 I can make templates and backups.\u00a0 I can setup a server exactly the way I want it and then make a template.\u00a0 I can then clone that template to use as another server later.\u00a0 I can do backups so I can try things and when I trash the computer I delete it and spin up another.\u00a0 No more imaging sd chips, swapping them out, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using Backups To Experiment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Just tonight I wanted to run a new theme in WordPress for this blog.  I spun up a clone of my server and loaded the theme to the clone.  The install trashed my links.  Or I trashed my links, I don’t know, I’m new to WordPress.  I cloned again and in 5 minutes I was ready to try again.  Once I got it set up right, I repeated the steps on my main WordPress server.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Even if you only run one virtualized machine on a pi that has been turned into a Pimox, the flexibility it offers is more than worth the light compute power and 1.5 gigs  of RAM Pimox takes to run. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Resources:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n