Hi All, I'm part of the association in my school, and we're looking to add new servers. I'm searching for a tool to manage the servers, create VMs, troubleshoot, and backup data. We currently use an old version of Proxmox VE, but nobody likes this solution, and we want a more recent and reliable solution.
I heard that Docker could be used for that but is it really reliable? Does anyone know a free tool (ideally open source) that will allow us to manage our servers efficiently?
Thanks.
Docker is safe in the sense that it works reliably. However, it does not separate a process from the machine on which it is running. If you have a virus in your docker container, then it could spread to other docker containers or onto the host machine. A VM should isolate a virus and prevent spread outside the VM but they are usually resource intensive. Docker containers, on the other hand, use less resources and load more quickly than a virtual machine.
VirtualBox is a free, open source, solution for creating virtual machines, but the extension pack may not be free. On Windows you could use Hyper-V at no additional cost beyond the price of a server edition. Lots of people use VMware but I have very little experience with it.
15 years of xp. I've done VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Zen, Kubernetes/Docker.... If I were going to choosing for your case today; that is, if you're looking for an upgrade from proxmox, but may not be ready to move to 'Enterprise' solutions from Microsoft, VMWare, etc.. take a look at RedHat Ovirt (and kubernetes/docker if you want/need a containerization layer) . Edit: Choosing an orchestration layer like Ansible/Terrraform (from another comment)... just do it.
