Advice on LXC for multiple appliances

[kit2]

Hi team,

I'm a newbie at Proxmox, and containers, and was hoping for some guidance on setting up my Proxmox server.

I'd like to replace my Asustor NAS, Raspberry Pi running Wire Guard, NPM, Pi-hole, Win11 machine and my router with a Proxmox server.

I've read several guides that recommend to setup containers, based either on Vanilla Debian or Alpine templates and then setup pi-hole, open-wrt etc on top of that.

And this is where my doubts creep in, since currently I have the Raspberry Pi running most of my appliances, so my question is can I just create 1 container to mimic that? Or do I need a container for each appliance?

My server is a i9t with 32gb ram, several 200-500g NVME drives, 10TB+ storage.

 

[leesteken]

And this is where my doubts creep in, since currently I have the Raspberry Pi running most of my appliances, so my question is can I just create 1 container to mimic that?

You can. You do need to install everything (using the x86 version of the software because Proxmox does not run on ARM) and reconfigure them to match your current settings.

Or do I need a container for each appliance?

That is also possible. Some people prefer it because they can backup/restore and migrate the services separately, but you don't need to if you don't want to.

EDIT: For internet accessible services, I run a nested Proxmox in a VM that runs services separated in containers.

 

[ubu]

You can of course run multiple Services on one container, but i would recomment to use one container per service.
You can do upgrades independently, so if pihole has an upgrade to the next debian release but eg paperless does not you can do that upgrade without breaking your other software. Securitywise your applikations are better split up, too.
You can do a restore of one container with its service without caring for the other containers as well, so i usually prefer one container per service for ease of management

 

[Dunuin]

And for critical services (router) or services that are attackable because they are accessible from the internet (wireguard) I personally would prefer a VM over an LXC. The additional abstraction of the virtualization helps with security and stability.

 

[kit2]

Thank you all, this is really helpful advice, especially the additional abstraction layer provided by a VM for publicly exposed appliances.