New server has been acquired. Debian 13 has been installed.
GS308EP switches have been acquired and installed.
Now, I’m working to migrate to the new machine. 3 1/2 years ago when I started futzing with Docker, I sorta followed guides and guessed, abused it trying to make it do things it wasn’t designed for, and flipped switches I likely shouldn’t have flipped, so the set up is more than a little shabby.
As a result, I’ll likely end more redeploying than migrating the containers.
So rather than go forward with Docker blindly, I want to reassess whether I shouldn’t look into Proxmox, LXC, or Podman instead of Docker, or maybe something else entirely?
Work is just about done dumping ESX for Nutanix, but both of those seem overkill for my needs.
Of course the forums for any of the solutions make their own out to be the best thing since sliced bread and the others useless, so I’m hoping to get a more nuanced answer here.
Proxmox with all of its warts appears to be the better hypervisor. If your host has the headroom like others suggested: proxmox with a VM hosting docker/podman.
I have to say running proxmox saved me from running to the basement or opening up IPMI a few times already when making suspect changes to a VM that otherwise would have taken down the network of my host.
ATM I’m running Proxmox with Nixos VMs running mixed docker/podman containers. It works out pretty well for my use case and with some opentofu fiddling I have most of my infrastructure defined in config files if that’s a rabbit hole you want to go down.
As for my experience with docker vs podman I have to say podman can pretty much do whatever docker does with the exception of docker swarm. You may have to do some digging to handle more advanced networking/gpu setups.
The only thing I have running docker atm is a gluetun container because container to container networking took more than 15m of research with podman so I fell back to the very well documented path using docker.