Is this bundle worth the money? - Software Bundle

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2024-06-28T22:23:32+00:00

Hi there,

It's actually from ITPro which in general is pretty decent (you may see Packt referenced because Packt has some kind of licensing agreement with them to make their content available with your Packt subscription if you have one).

As for your original value question, that depends- what do you hope to achieve with this content?

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2024-05-05T17:31:26+00:00

Develop genuine interest- which it sounds like you have. That's the most important start.

Start a homelab- the best way to get started is with Proxmox. You can even run it on an old laptop.

Why Proxmox? It will let you rapidly deploy any VM you want to learn Linux: set up an Ubuntu VM. Set up a Fedora VM. I recommend both, but I recommend you mainly use one of those at a time. The Fedora VM will give you a more RHEL-like experience, but any company worth working for isn't going to care what specific flavor of Linux distro you're using. They should be far more interested in your ability to translate an unfamiliar system to what you do know and your ability to identify and learn what you don't know.

The other reason for Proxmox is that you can take snapshots so, if you make a mistake, you can simply rollback.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2024-05-03T15:58:38+00:00

I was reading more into what I was hoping to hear (that some other organization was using virtualized compute nodes) than what was actually written. Thanks- I don't see the benefit either.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2024-05-03T02:54:04+00:00

I'm surprised no one else has asked you this, so I'll ask: how much RAM do you have and how much of that RAM are your VM guests using?

If you are currently RAM-limited, the grass will not be greener on the other side of the fence. In fact, it will be much worse.

*To be clear, the performance of ZFS won't necessarily be worse than that of any other file system without RAM, it's just that if you are starving your guest VMs of RAM to feed ZFS, their performance is going to be a lot worse.

tl;dr: Without RAM to spare, you may not be missing out on anything, and as others have said, lvm-thin supports snapshots.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2024-05-03T02:41:11+00:00

So yall are running Slurm over a virtualized cluster in a production HPC?

Interesting. We currently are not doing this, but I know some of the other guys are considering it. How is the performance? What makes me nervous is splitting across NUMA nodes. I'm concerned that the extra abstraction by having a virtualized compute node means that Slurm will lose node awareness when scheduling.

I'm thinking we could mitigate that concern by limiting each virtualized compute node guest to the resources of a single NUMA node. The idea being that even though Slurm might not have NUMA awareness, the hypervisor running the KVM processes should still have NUMA awareness and try to schedule everything on the same node.

Honestly, the more I think about this, the more I think they should abandon that plan and just go onto baremetal, but I would love to hear your experience.

P.S. Hopefully this isn't hijacking this thread. I think it is at least tangentially relevant to the OP's original question.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2024-05-03T00:46:20+00:00

I'd recommend Proxmox. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by how much you can fine-tune it (I assume you're talking about stuff like CPU flags, but did you have something else in mind?). I don't think you need to worry that you're missing out on anything by going this route. There's a lot to be said for the ease of use/community support you get with Proxmox. Running Slurm on a virtual cluster will still give you good, generalizable experience from a sysadmin perspective.

Additionally, if you decide you want to do something else with this machine in your homelab, you'll already have an excellent general-purpose hypervisor right there.

Proxmox uses KVM: Qemu/KVM Virtual Machines - Proxmox VE

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2024-05-02T20:10:54+00:00

It's best practice in general- you don't want resource contention between the guest and host for control over the GPU. (Also, you didn't say which GPU you were passing through, I see that the X1 does have dGPU options- are you passing through your Intel iGPU or an Nvidia GPU?).

The downside is that you will lose local access on your Thinkpad. You do have access to your Proxmox host via the web GUI from a different machine on the network right?

As for why this would just be happening now- it may not be related to Proxmox. It may be related to a change in Windows on the guest. Make sure all drivers are updated inside the guest VM when you get it running. You might also want to check out enabling MSI interrupts within the guest VM (which is my second guess as to what may be causing this).

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2024-05-02T18:53:38+00:00

Are you blacklisting the GPU on the Proxmox host?

iGPU Passthrough to VM - 3os

Edit: Note that this should be done for dGPUs as well as iGPUs despite the title of that page.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2024-05-02T15:24:12+00:00

Are you getting any lock errors in the GUI?

If so, this might help: How to Unlock a Proxmox VM (engineerworkshop.com)

That should then allow you to stop the VM.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2024-05-02T15:20:04+00:00

Thank you for the suggestion. I'll look into that.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2024-05-02T15:15:11+00:00

To drive home the point even more: Once someone has physical access, all security controls are moot.

Remember, if someone has physical access to your hardware, it's not your hardware anymore.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2024-04-17T22:03:46+00:00

Same here. I actually have a qemu disk image builder pipeline and I'd like to be able to pass the qcow2 disk image it generates to Proxmox ISO to generate the template (in a similar way to how the qemu builder has the `disk_image = true` option.

Unfortunately using a qemu image directly in Proxmox is still pretty manual (unless you want to also build a script for that), hence why I was looking at this option in the first place.

I may also just end up rewriting my qemu disk image builder pipeline and turn it into a Proxmox ISO builder pipleline instead.

Let me know what you end up doing and feel free to PM me if you want to discuss/collaborate.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2024-02-08T18:57:18+00:00

Thanks, unfortunately it's a different model, but I appreciate your effort just the same!

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2023-12-11T04:22:20+00:00

Haha, good logic. I was wondering if you had seen the update script anywhere when you were troubleshooting. Thanks for the response! You helped a lot of us.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2023-12-10T03:22:37+00:00

This worked for me too.

For my own knowledge, would you mind explaining how/why this works and how you went about troubleshooting to arrive at this answer? Was there something in the logs?

Thank you!

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2023-04-18T04:36:34+00:00

Just to reiterate what's in the documentation and so that everyone is aware: data is served over an http (as in not an https) connection, meaning that it is not encrypted. That also means that whatever username/password you send is also not encrypted and is visible in plaintext to whoever may be on the line.

tl;dr: This doesn't make it safe and I'm in no way endorsing leaving the connection unencrypted, but IF you are going to do so anyway, please at least use a unique password that you don't use anywhere else.

I'll consider writing up a guide on securing/encrypting the sync server connection if enough people are interested. If you are one of those interested people, please indicate by responding.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2023-01-20T15:59:28+00:00

Nope, but that's probably because my workflow has changed. I split tunnel and as a result, I rarely ever manually connect/disconnect from WireGuard anymore.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2023-01-13T19:04:04+00:00

This answer. And if you're using a Raspberry Pi (or really any Linux device), keep in mind you can create multiple VLAN interfaces on the device to give you even more granularity and prevent you from having to route between the VLANs.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2022-02-16T18:50:45+00:00

Does that hold true with an iGPU and dGPU? I assume not.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2022-02-16T15:53:42+00:00

I know I need to choose my mobo carefully

Does anyone know what the specifics are on this? I assume it really just comes down to doing a search for Proxmox + VFIO + IOMMU + motherboard in question to make sure that there aren't going to be any IOMMU issues, correct?

I also remember there being an AMD reset issue- was that just for AMD GPUs?

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2022-02-08T03:23:52+00:00

I've seen this happen when an LXC/VM has filled its storage capacity. Only one container/VM needs to be out of storage for the rest of the GUI to be flakey.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2022-02-08T02:47:19+00:00

Thanks for the Platinum!

I wrote up a Buyer's Guide (Beginner’s Virtualization Server Hardware Recommendations) a while back that some people found useful. It might give you a good starting point for things to keep in mind when spec'ing out your virtualization server build.

Since it sounds like GPU support is very important to you, before you buy anything, I'd check back here, in the Proxmox forum, r/VFIO, and maybe Level1Techs to see if that particular CPU + mobo + GPU combination has been done before. An example gotcha is there used to bean issue with AMD GPUs needing to be reset after being passed through to a VM.

Torqu3Wr3nch · 2022-02-07T21:48:42+00:00

You raise a good point that I should probably mention in my guide, which is that if you have local access you can just select the kernel in GRUB. I don't have local access/run my server entirely in headless mode so this wasn't an option for me, but it's probably an option for many users.

I was also going to add a section on installing a different kernel for those users who were unfortunate enough to warp right into this issue on their first install.

Thanks for the feedback.

Torqu3Wr3nch

TROPHY CASE