Still struggling with concepts of Container VS VM in proxmox

[tymanthius]

First, I haven't set up my system yet (home server) as last parts are due today.

But I'm still unclear on how Proxmox differentiates a VM from a container?

As I understand it, a VM is the whole OS. It will simulate booting from power off to desktop/cli at full boot. But a container is NOT the full OS. It's just a captured install that builds on the underlying OS. So it relies on all the underlying OS for hardware interface.

If that is true, then in cases where you'd want pci passthru, it would seem to make more sense to use a container.

Does that work in practice?

Or am I completely wrong here?

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,
you are right but

First, I haven't set up my system yet (home server) as last parts are due today.
If that is true, then in cases where you'd want pci passthru, it would seem to make more sense to use a container.

It dependence on the scenario.

What you what to do?

 

[tymanthius]

Hi,
you are right but

It dependence on the scenario.

What you what to do?

Right now, the only thing I'm wanting that would work better w/ direct access to the hardware is Emby. It supports transcoding via the intel gpu on my processor.

Ohterwise, the only reason I could see to use a container is it would be lighter/smaller. Most of what I want to run will run on Debian just fine.

 

[deranjer]

Right now, the only thing I'm wanting that would work better w/ direct access to the hardware is Emby. It supports transcoding via the intel gpu on my processor.

Ohterwise, the only reason I could see to use a container is it would be lighter/smaller. Most of what I want to run will run on Debian just fine.

LXC containers use the same kernel as the host, so it is plausible that if it is supported in the base OS it will be passed onto the containers, but I'm not too familiar with APU setups, and not sure if you can limit that or unlimit that per container, especially since I don't know exactly how LXC handles that. I can tell you I run a plex server and it runs just fine in a container, although I can't seem to do PCI tv tuner passthrough anymore (and the forums apparently don't know either), so if you plan on having Emby do TV Tuner stuff you may need to do that on a VM.

 

[tymanthius]

No tv tuner, and ple doesn't support gpu transcoding, so it wouldn't make a diff. Thanks tho!