this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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Curious to know what the experiences are for those who are sticking to bare metal. Would like to better understand what keeps such admins from migrating to containers, Docker, Podman, Virtual Machines, etc. What keeps you on bare metal in 2025?

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[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Pure bare metal is crazy to me. I run proxmox and mount my storage there, and from there it is shared to machines that need it. It would be convenient to do a pass through to TrueNAS, for some of the functions it provides but I don’t trust that my skills for that. I’d have kept TrueNAS on bare metal, but I need so little horsepower for my services that it would be a waste. I don’t think the trade offs of having TrueNAS run my virtualisation environment were really worth it.

My router is bare metal. It’s much simpler to handle the networking with a single physical device like that. Again, it would be convenient to set up opnsense in a VM for failover. but it introduces a bunch of complexity I don’t want or really need. The router typically goes down only for maintenance, not because it crashed or something. I don’t have redundant power or ISPs either.

To me, docker is an abstraction layer I don’t need. VMs are good enough, and proxmox does a good job with LXCs so far.

Why would I spin up a VM and virtual network within that vm and then a container when I can just spin up a VM?

I’ve not spent time learning Docker or k8s; it seems very much a tool designed for a scale that most companies don’t operate at let alone my home lab.