

Came in here to mention Incus if no one had.
I love it. I have three “home production” servers running Proxmox, but mostly because Proxmox is one of very few LTS/comercially-supported ways to run Linux in a supported way with root (and everything else on ZFS). And while its web UI is still a bit clunky in places, it comes in handy some times.
However, Incus automation is just… superior. incus launch --vm images:debian/13 foo
, wait a few seconds then incus exec foo -- bash
and I’m root on a console of a ready-to-go Debian VM. Without --vm
, it’s a lightweight LXC container. And Ansible supports running commands through incus exec
, so you can provision stuff WITHOUT BOTHERING TO SET UP ANYTHING.
AND, it works remotely without fuss, so I can set up an Incus remote on a beefy server and spawn VMs nearly transparently. + incus file pull|push
to transfer files.
I’m kinda pondering scripting removal of the Proxmox bits from a Proxmox install, so that I just keep their ZFS support and run Incus on top.
I haven’t tested this, but I would expect there to be ways to do it, esp for VMs if they are not LXC containers.
(I try to automate provisioning as much as possible, so I don’t do this kind of stuff often.)
The Incus forum is not huge, but it’s friendly, and the authors are quite active.