I really like Syncthing, Nextcloud, Forgejo and Mailcow to collaborate with colleagues.
Kimai allows me to track hours and get paid.
Barrier allows me to use several computers at once.
Xen Orchestra is pretty much on par with VMWare stuff and way cheaper.
What other awesome software does allow you to work more efficiently in a business context and stays out of your way?
KVM Hypervisors
Proxmox VE makes this easy. Also makes building a cluster of such hypervisors easy. There’s a free version that gives you the entire feature set but you need to pay for support and access to the Enterprise repository.
It’s not the only option, and it may not even be the best option, but it’s pretty damn good.
I’m not even talking about proxmox, I’m talking about straight up QEMU with virt-manager on any RHEL like distro. Better yet if you have cockpit installed.
That’s good as well, of course. I use QEMU with virt-manager and cockpit on my office workstation running EndeavourOS and it’s glorious. Keeps Windows from ever being installed on the bare metal.
From a usability perspective, though, I think Proxmox lowers the barrier to entry, as the web UI feels considerably more powerful out of the box than cockpit. An interesting bonus is that you can add it to an existing Debian install, including one with a DE, though it’s not something one would want to do in production.
I don’t consider proxmox to be enterprise grade though, so I won’t touch it.
Care to elaborate?
Libvirt is great, been using it at home to run VMs for ~10 years now.
I happily pay for their support. Haven’t needed it, but IMO; money well spent.
What would be the best option ?
Depends on what level of responsiveness you need from the support team. I run it in my home lab and haven’t needed to raise any tickets as all the info I need to solve problems is readily available on their forums or in assorted blog posts. A company relying on it for their critical infrastructure would probably be best-served with Standard (4-hr response within a business day) or Premium (2-hr response within a business day).
If those still aren’t quick enough it may be worth looking into a partner of theirs, or into another commercial option altogether. I’ve interacted with the Red Hat support team on some high-severity issues and they are top-tier; that was unrelated to virtualization, though, and they tend to push the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization solution quite hard. I’m talking a response time of minutes.
If I’m using kvm on any standalone (non-clustered) hosts on the data center it’s typically on Ubuntu LTS, knowing that the company I work for has a Canonical support agreement in their back pocket, but we haven’t needed it.
Thanks for sharing your experience, I was interested to know what are the best options for a home lab. I will look into KVM.