Proxmox without... proxmox?

[Clete2]

I have an old AMD APU that I am running a custom Ubuntu root-on-zfs setup and it is very fragile, specifically because Grub + ZFS do not play nicely. Proxmox has `proxmox-boot-tool` which manages a 512MB EFI partition automatically. I love that, because it's simple and well-tested, unlike my custom installation. The issue is -- this AMD APU is severely underpowered and does not have all the virtualization extensions necessary for a true Proxmox VE installation.

I have an idea -- and I tried this out in a VM. What if I install Proxmox on this computer to get my root-on-zfs setup that I desire, and then disable all Proxmox services? Will there be any issues? I expect doing so will leave me with a mostly-pure Debian system installation.

What I turned off in my VM:

* pve-firewall
* pvescheduler
* pveproxy
* pvefw-logger
* pvedaemon
* pve-ha-crm
* pve-cluster
* pvestatd
* pve-ha-lrm
* spiceproxy
* lxc-monitord
* lxcfs
* qmeventd
* rrdcached
* ksmtuned
* rpcbind

 

[UdoB]

Though I didn't test this: why not? Just make sure to have the PVE repository enabled. And of course this is not supported by any means ;-)

Good luck

 

[t.lamprecht]

It might be actually simpler to use the PBS installer if you want to profit from its simple and automatic setup, as PBS brings much fewer services/packages to disable or remove compared to the quite complex PVE, but both share (most) of the installer.

Then you could ensure that only the kernel and boot tool helper packages stay available by using commands like:

apt install pve-kernel-helper pve-kernel-5.15 proxmox-archive-keyring proxmox-backup-server-
apt autoremove --purge

This ensures that the helper, the kernel meta and the archive keyring are marked as manually installed and thus not suggested being auto-removed later, and the packages with the trailing minus results in a remove request for the main PBS package.

 

[Clete2]

Good options thanks. I’m okay with packages staying installed so that I’m as close to vanilla as possible. I may in the future upgrade the motherboard so I’ll probably stick with PVE since it’s what I know and love.