I created 2 VMs on Proxmox that is on Ubuntu 22.04... was that silly?

[DJNativus]

I am new to Proxmox and might have done a silly. I installed Proxmox 8 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and immediately made 2 VMs on it that are both Kubuntu. I thought LXC containers were like docker containers and per app. Now in further research, if Proxmox is on a Debian-based system, and the OS you want to run is also Debian based, there is no need for a VM? That is more for something else like Windows?

So am I wasting resources with my current setup? Should they have been LXCs?

Thanks!

 

[Folke]

Hey,
actually the guest in a container doesn't even have to be debian based, you can totally run a alpine or fedora container on a debian host.
It's true that lxc containers are more lightweight than vms, but they also come with some drawbacks.
Probably most relevant to you, some interactions with the system, like mounting stuff, can be a bit more involved, since that is usually forbidden
inside an container for security reasons. There is a privileged mode for containers, but at that point your giving up a lot of isolation, that you usually want. Everything between that probably means manually editing the containers config file and adjusting some apparmor rules.

Personally I had everything on VM's until my resources ran dry and migrating almost everything to containers gave me back almost a third of my ram.

TL;DR: LXC containers are more lightweight, but can also complicate stuff, especially if you are new to them

 

[DJNativus]

Hey,
actually the guest in a container doesn't even have to be debian based, you can totally run a alpine or fedora container on a debian host.
It's true that lxc containers are more lightweight than vms, but they also come with some drawbacks.
Probably most relevant to you, some interactions with the system, like mounting stuff, can be a bit more involved, since that is usually forbidden
inside an container for security reasons. There is a privileged mode for containers, but at that point your giving up a lot of isolation, that you usually want. Everything between that probably means manually editing the containers config file and adjusting some apparmor rules.

Personally I had everything on VM's until my resources ran dry and migrating almost everything to containers gave me back almost a third of my ram.

TL;DR: LXC containers are more lightweight, but can also complicate stuff, especially if you are new to them

Thank you for your reply! Yeah it's likely be too complicated. As this is a server with 64 GBs of RAM and I only plan on having 3 maybe 4 VMs I should be fine this way.