I’m a Windows guy since forever and I recently got into selfhosting. So far its a blast! Are posts about that welcome here?
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I self hosted windows for many years, mostly because that is what I used at work. I liked it because it hid some of the low level details and worked most of the time.
The thing that finally made me switch was the exorbitant cost of licenses and the need to run services on older hardware.
DM me if you want some keys. I have a few copies of win10 and winIOT laying around that I’m not going to use.
They better be! I’ve got a mix of proxmox running Windows and Linux machines, as well as a bare metal Windows machine for streaming gaming, as wells as Linux laptops to access all this.
… My only shame is using Windows server to host my DHCP server.
Are you hosting on win server? I’m genuinely curious, not trying to shill Linux though I prefer it on the server side, believe me I’ve been on the receiving end of that for desktop Linux. How do you manage it? Do you have your home LAN set up as an active directory domain? Do you use mostly Powershell or the GUI? What do you have running on it? It just seems like everything on the server side assumes you’re using Linux and the only stuff that runs on Win server is stuff made by Microsoft like MS SQL server or IIS.
You can find a description of my first project here https://lemmy.world/post/48204688
Private email. Very nice 👍
My host OS is Windows Server 2022 because I Prefer it, HyperV works, Windows Backup works, and the drivers work. I then run a Linux VM for Docker and a few other VM’s for silly things. If I break a VM I can have it restored in a few clicks. I tried to use Proxmox as the host OS but it would kill itself every 6 months. It was a good learning experience but it would take a Lot of convincing to try it again.
I’m gonna sound like everyone I complain about here, so feel free to ignore me. How did Proxmox break? I’ve been hosting a bunch of Proxmox containers on a 15 year old crappy laptop and it’s been smooth sailing for at least a year and a half.
Not trying to shun you for using windows or discount your personal experience with Proxmox or anything, just genuinely curious. If you prefer windows, use it.
I can’t remember the actual errors. I was running it on an old DELL PC they I had added an extra drive to, I think it was an SSD I had lying about. Everything would be running fine with no errors, Linux and Windows VM’s. Then one day all services were offline. Being a PC I had to plug in a screen+KB/Mouse. The host OS would boot and then flood the screen with errors regarding unable to mount the storage. troubleshooting with Boot USB showed all of the virtual Partitions (the ones that the VM data sits in) had been corrupted. Maybe a Linux guru could have restored them but I was lost.
I started over with a clean install of Proxmox, Maybe I had done something wrong the first time. I cant remember if I managed to restore the VM’s from backup. A few months later Bam, exact same thing happened again. I thought maybe my PC or drives had issues but decided to try Windows 2019 HyperV host instead. That ran for 2 years without issues on the same hardware.
/s
I love that movie lol its a family fave!
100% there is room for Windows self hosters. Welcome. May your self hosting be productive, secure and fun.
Sure are. I started self hosting with a VM on Hyper-V.
Oh, I’m sorry. Lol.
Hyper-V is just so bad. Decided to run it for a while as a test, I couldn’t get back to ESXi fast enough, haha. And I come from the Enterprise world where Hyper-V is common.
Honestly I find hyper v to be easier to work with then virtual box for home stuff and with what Broadcom has done to VMware I am staying away from it.
Yea, the Broadcom crap really sucks. I feel bad for businesses being held ransom by them.
Hyper-V just isn’t an option for small businesses, unfortunately (it’s really designed for Enterprise where internal expertise is the norm).
I can ignore their nonsense for my home setup., fortunately.
Have you tried XCP-NG or Proxmox?
Nice to hear it!
My homelab is a mishmash of Windows and Linux machines. The primary game server is Windows and the rest others are Linux.
I was at this point for a while, believing gaming on Linux wasn’t up to par, until I discovered that Linux has a decent translation layer (Proton/Wine) that means even though the vast majority of Steam games are Windows only, Steam or other launchers like Heroic just run them in a container, and from my experience none of my games have had issues. This has only improved massively over the years.
That’s so cool! Have you ever tried a BSD?
I’ve experimented with OpenBSD in the past, but it was back when I was solely a Windows kid before embracing and clicking with Linux. It just never really meshed with me.
Windows is what I already but I’m also curious to learn linux and bsd at some point.
Sure ! But… How !? I don’t have even the first idea how you’d host… Almost anything on Windows 😅 and I would be concerned by the power consumption of any non-minimalist OS.
Docker for desktop will also let you run a lot of services
Isn’t docker on windows just Linux in a trenchcoat?
My ESXi box draws 20 watts at idle with 3 Windows VMs and 3 Linux VMs.
Guess which of those VMs draws the most power (hint: it’s not Windows).
Did you install the guest tools and set the CPU governor to the correct scheduler? Do the Windows boxes host the same applications as the Linux boxes?
Windows Server exists.
It really shouldn’t, but it does.
… I’m stealing that 😀
Hyper-v server can get pretty damn lightwieght as it ships without a GUI
+1 for Hyper-V, despite being glitchy and only sustaining Home Assistant for about 12 hours this and VirtualBox were my best chance at self hosting VMs on a Windows host. The problem wasn’t the virtualization, but the rest of the OS and its persistent maintenance cycles. Antivirus (MsMpEng.exe) and its NTFS scanning running more and more resources until the CPU was clogged. OP has gotta start somewhere.
Oh I was suggesting a the free standalone hyper v server MS did but I just searched for it and it looks like they killed it off recently which sucks. Was probably the best MS os going.
I guess everyone is welcome, from windows to people doing it on OSes they made themselves!
I self host on windows. It just happened to be what I had on the box. Then I got started with docker. So that was great. When I have the time, I hope to switch to unraid, but need the time to be open enough to deal with the problem that will arise in getting the system set up just right.
Welcome sure, but few and far between. Check out JimsGarage on YouTube. He does a lot of windows selfhosting content
I don’t think that Linux is in the title or description of this community!
You pick your own poison …
Mine is Gentoo Linux all the way, yours is Windows. Find two more selfhosters and they will criticize both of us! We are kind of the two extreme of the spectrum…
Welcome!
So true! I met a friend of a friend at a church social last week and he spent the whole time trying to convince me to try FreeBSD instead of selfhosting on Windows. I might try it someday but as polite as he was about it he just couldn’t get the hint lol
Yeah, but you’ll probably figure it out eventually.
Find two more selfhosters and they will criticize both of us!
Absolutely. However I’d argue that some BSD variant is at the other end, not Gentoo, so there’s at least some critics to you ;).
I’m running proxmox and (mostly) Debian on top of that, and I’m sure that there’s someone thinking I’m doing things the wrong way.
With Windows Servers I think the bigger problem is that there’s way less people running things on top of it, so there’s less knowledge about problems and solving them. However, many of us are on corporate IT jobs too and thus have to work with Windows, so that might somewhat cancel out the difference in popularity.
Gentoo taught me a lot. I ran hardened gentoo with grsec, pax, and selinux ~20 years ago. That was really a nag. I’m glad for the experience though, I’m never afraid to compile my own kernel now. I just prefer the convenience of debian or fedora based distros now.
When I do a hardware refresh on my self hosted machines(typically over 5 years) I usually wait for a bleeding edge brand new socket, and have to compile the latest kernel for reasonable performance and stability until maintainers backport or the distro moves forward.
How does Gentoo work for you? Is it true, that an update takes like a week, because you have to compile everything from scratch?
It’s a myth.
Yes it takes longer, but specialy on headless server updates are pretty fast
Big boys like LibreOffice Firefox have also pre built binaries if you so prefer as well …
I use Gentoo since amd k6-400 MHz times so today build times feel like no wait at all
Always. Started on windows hypervisors and windows as they were relevant to my work and I was trying to skill up at the time. Since moved to a Linux stack as the lab grew in scope and my distaste for MS grew as well.
my distaste for MS grew
This is a natural progression. Inescapable.
Verily. Especially after working with heavily windows/MS environments for a decade and change. Intune makes my blood boil.
Linux is favored because the ecosystem is more open but you can also run it on low power devices which isn’t really the case with Windows (and getting worse over time) and it’s free with Windows, to be legal, you need to license the cores/VM. Now does anyone actually do that?! I wouldn’t think so.
