TriLUG September

September 11 - Hypervisors in the Homelab with Xen Orchestra

Pizza and water provided. Community announcements to kick off. Approximately 25 folks in attendance.

Why? Homelab moving from VMWare Vsphere to Xen Orchestra. Presented more in-depth install a year ago.

Compared Proxmox, Hyper-V, and kubernetes. Focused on type 1 hypervisor, ruling out libvirt.

Stepped through demos of install, talked about the UI, and plugins. Installs can be done multiple at time also.

Explained backups Looked good for multiple vms. Cronjob like. Tags assist in picking what and when to backup.

Metrics, there's a xen exporter for prometheus.

This meeting dives into his journey of homelab changes from 2024 to today.

Firewall – Sonic firewall — I'd say do tailscale. 😄

Why not kubernetes? Not what he wanted to get into for running vms.
Harvester was suggested for the interface to kubevirt in kubernetes.

Network diagram. 7 networks for a home is a tad complex. Explained how keeping the traffic separate made sense to him. If a chart is needed, it's a complex network.
Got in-depth about vlans. Did I say it was complex?

New infrastructure layout was simpler to him. Tad complex still to me.
2.5 GbE(?) ports and 10 GbE ports, along with better than copper connections. Not networking I'm familiar with. Wow for a home lab.
Ah, vm transfers is the reason for all the networking.

Talked through terraform that interacts with xen orchestra to make things happen.

Went into the difference of arp and bgp from a metallb. A tad of a stretch into this level of networking.