Transitioning my Trilium Server from a RPi to a VM under Proxmox

[doobes]

Hey all,

Things on my RPi server have worked well, but I recently bought a HP EliteDesk 705 to run Proxmox on with VM's. (Actually I have 2 of them. The things are stupid cheap)

The machine has 4 cores, 16 Gb of memory and a 250 Gb SSD.

In setting up other VM's under Proxmox, I've come to the realization that the initial configuration is critical.

The RPi was configured to store the Trilium files on my NAS via an NFS file share. This has worked fine. I as concerned about the file store consuming the sd card. Looking at the files stored on the NAS, it's only 2 Gb. So, this really wasn't the issue I was expecting.

So, I'm prolly going to store the files locally in the VM. Some sort of backup will be necessary, but that shouldn't be too difficult.

Any ideas what would be a good setting baseline for this VM?

Off the top of my head, I was going to allocate 2 cores, 4 Gb of memory and 64 Gb of storage.

Thoughts?

Thank you

[landshark22]

Probably not necessary for use a full on VM in Proxmox. There's an LXC installation script that might be useful to you here:

https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=trilium

Maybe that might be helpful to you.

[meichthys]

It would all depend on what underlying OS you're going to run, and like @landshark22 said, a VM is probably quite overkill. I would indeed recommend an LXC container, or if you run (or plan to run) other docker containers, you could create a single Docker VM that can then run any number of docker containers (in addition to triliumnext).

If you do want to continue with a dedicated VM, I would think a single core and 2GB would probably be plenty, but as always, if you have the resources, it's usually worth throwing extra RAM at VMs. Containers are much less resource hungry since they share the host's kernel.

As for backups, you can use proxmox to backup VMs or Containers. You can also take snapshots so you can revert back in time if you plan to make significant changes that could break things.

[meichthys]

Docker is probably going to be your best time investment since most projects these days provide a docker-compose you can use. My recommendation would be to install a VM (debian/ubuntu is probably easiest), then follow the Docker install guide to install docker on your VM, then to give yourself a nice web GUI to manage your docker, you can install portainer using docker that you installed on your BM. After installing Portainer, you can VERY easily setup new docker containers for TriliumNext and other projects.

[doobes]

Ok,

This is all fairly new to me, so please lead me by the hand for a bit....

You are saying I should set up a VM under Proxmox on the device, and then a VM with Docker/Portainer.

This might seem like a stupid question, but what purpose does Proxmox serve at that point?

Would it make sense to install Ubuntu server on the device, then Docker/Portainer?

Thanks

[meichthys]

You are saying I should set up a VM under Proxmox on the device, and then a VM with Docker/Portainer.

No, it should just be one VM running Ubuntu Server OS, then docker is installed as a package on Ubuntu. Then Portainer is installed as a container in docker.

You have a good point about the purpose of proxmox. For me Proxmox makes backups trivial and snapshotting VMS makes it easy to update or make changes to the VM docker machine without any worries - since I can easily revert the changes (its not as easy to revert changes on bare metal).

[doobes]

Thank you!

[meichthys]

If you'd like, I'd be glad to show you my setup for inspiration. Just PM me on Matrix (if you're on there).