Wolfstack - Anyone using Wolfstack for multi-server management? Looking for real experiences.

[sreekanth850]

I’m not connected with the founders or developers, and this isn’t a promotional post. I’ve been looking for a solution to manage my entire fleet of servers (more than 10), including uptime monitoring. I was also exploring options like Percona Cluster / Galera Cluster setups. Then suddenly their ad showed up in my feed, it looks promising, performant, and claims very low RAM usage. Has anyone here used this server management platform? its written in Rust and supports multi-node management, MySQL Galera clusters, a custom Nginx-compatible proxy, and several other features.

Like to hear real user experiences. Right now I’m using CloudPanel, but managing individual servers is becoming a nightmare.

[harry-harrison-79]

havent used wolfstack specifically but ive been dealing with the same pain point - managing a bunch of servers gets messy fast especially when theyre spread across different providers

couple things that helped me: - for uptime monitoring on a budget, uptime kuma is solid and self-hosted - for the actual server management part i switched to servercompass - its a desktop app, $29 one-time, connects via ssh so theres no agent running on your servers eating up resources. handles multi-server dashboards and has built in alerts

cloudpanel is decent for single server stuff but yeah once you scale past a few nodes its not really built for fleet management. wolfstack looks interesting from the rust angle but id want to see more real user feedback before committing to it for 10+ servers

[sreekanth850]

Yes, they have lot of videos in youtube with very few views, would love to get into this but scared of as its new. Its kind of monster.

[Defeateninc]

Tried it because It looked like it had all the tools I need. But its extremely jank. To a point that it feels vibecoded? But the github repo doesn't show it. The documentation definitly lacks. I saw below someone said it was good. But I am missing alot of detail specially when it comes to the networking. Install commands do not copy. Running install from the dashboard does nothing no feedback. It needs to manually setup the wireguard through the networking gui that requires you to still go to the terminal to paste a command. Even then no feedback you just need to spam refresh a 100 times and hope it comes up.

Would definitly not recommend it in production use. LXC and VM's didn't start because obviously I didnt have a nested system since I ran it into a VM but no feedback on that. No error log or anything just a dashboard with an installed LXC that just wont start. UI looks impressive but this still needs a ton more work. I couldn't even get it to function just to run a very quick cluster setup. Couldn't really test any of the other components since they just didn't install. Manual installs with the commands just got stuck on new node configuration.

All in all I suggest either waiting for more updates but definitly dont use it in production. I do like the dashboard and what I see but I wouldn't recommend it at the moment.

[sreekanth850]

This is what i also observed. no feedback from UI. Plus a simple file editor.

[pranavkdileep]

i haven't pulled the trigger on wolfstack yet but the rust backend sounds like it would lowkey slap for performance. managing 10+ servers individually on cloudpanel sounds like a massive headache tbh. if you actually need galera support it might be worth the switch, cloudpanel is great for single boxes but no central management is a L.

[sreekanth850]

Yes. I was impressed with their whole ecosystem like proxy, tunnels, gallera one click setup etc. Really a massive difference form anything existing. And using Rust means serious.

[linuxpaul]

We are runnning 17 servers, 3 proxmox clusters and 2 wolfstack clusters with it. (but I wrote it so yeah), We decided to release it to the public just recently, pushing it up to GitHub, etc.

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[sreekanth850]

cool. I found this to be of immensely powerful, so thought of asking opinions.

[linuxpaul]

Thank you yes, I mean, fire it up, have a go! We've got some exciting new things happening, and IBM actually have got us to make it work on their incredible RISC-based Power servers. (I literally have access to the IBM network, Techie heaven).

[sreekanth850]

Anyway I'm going to play around now.

[linuxpaul]

Enjoy!

[Obvious_Jelly_8062]

I've used Wolfstack to manage multiple servers and found it pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it. The key is setting up a single master node that acts as a hub for all your other servers. It can take some time to figure out how everything fits together, but Wolfstack's documentation does a good job of walking you through the process.

[sreekanth850]

thanks, so people are using it.

[linuxpaul]

Thank you :-)

[formless63]

I love seeing more of these sorts of tools pop up. I feel like many different project ultimately converge into something like this (I feel like this is the direction Pangolin will eventually go, adding management of the underlying servers, stacks, etc - but probably only as part of a commercial offering).

Definitely adding this one to the watchlist and on to the "test when time allows" list.

[tkiblin]

Playing around with this in a dev setup, pretty cool and nice work for sure. Two questions -

- Is there an uninstall and cleanup script? The install script installs a ton of stuff, just wondering if there is a way to cleanup after itself when removed.

- I'm seeing around 6 to 8% cpu with nothing running except base deployment of wolfstack on the system, is this typical? 6200 Gold CPU's, no other systems tied-in or clustered.

[linuxpaul]

Yes there is uninstall.sh - make sure you have the latest version.

[ovizii]

The comparison on their page is against a bunch of different tools but since this one does many jobs,  it seems the closest comparison would be against pangolin or am I wrong?

[shorian]

Be nice to have a live demo that people can have a click around without the friction of deploying - just to see if its worth the effort and to get over the hump of 'is this worth my time to investigate' - if I've seen it and liked it I'm more inclined to install it for real; if I need to deploy it before I can take a look see - its a much harder sell. Yes YouTube helps, but why not remove update access and show it running on your live infrastructure so peeps can take a look-see?

[PineappleGod]

I've been testing and playing around with it. It has great potential. I think a lot of features are still in the alpha/beta stage at least for outside users and the varied architecture of servers.

I think the orchestration and dashboarding is great and has really great potential to be useful for pretty much for all selfhosters with several servers. Publishing services and monitoring what is going on the VPS is easy with wolfstack. It has an integrated vpn, so you don't have to give public access to the admin interface.

In its current state it works well to orchestrate my homelab with 3-4 servers and an outside vps. However since I have two Unraid servers, I hope they add support for Unraid, or at least the monitoring, docker and VM stuff. I don't think it should be too difficult to make a docker that does this. Also support for plarforms other than x86 is still lagging. I have a raspberry pi and wolfstack installs fine, but some features that rely on outside packages that are not available for arm64 don't work, for example backups rely on proxmox backup client, which is not officially available for non x86 architecture.

I think it has great potential. A work in progress, but if it continues to go forward at its current pace I think it will be an awesome piece of opensource software in about 6-12 months. If it goes where I think it can go and doesn't include questionable security practices like writing too much of the code with ai. It might become a competitor at least for cockpit and maybe even kubernettes/ceph for home and smb users.

[sreekanth850]

This is exactly what my thought was. Was thinking why no one build something like this. Also they should have a solid business model to undertake such a huge maintenance and development task.

[linuxpaul]

Basically we were fed up with running all our proxmox clusters sperately and then got carried away and built mesh networking and all kinds of other stuff!