标签：#Virtualization

Docker VMM (virtual machine monitor) is Docker's new, first-party virtualization layer for Docker Desktop, replacing third-party virtualization components with an engine that Docker can directly control and optimize specifically for container workloads. The public beta launched with Docker Desktop 4.86 for Mac and Windows. By Sergio De Simone

Back in February I published a post about osx-proxmox-next , a tool that builds a macOS VM on Proxmox with one command instead of an afternoon of OpenCore plist editing. About 1,500 people read it. Some of them installed it. On hardware I don't own. That's when the interesting bugs showed up. 150 commits later, here are five failures that don't appear in any macOS-on-Proxmox guide I've found, with the actual root cause for each. 1. The installer stalls at 100% CPU and nothing moves Symptom: macOS installer reaches the copy phase. CPU pegged at 100%. Disk IO and network throughput both flat zero. It sits there forever. Only on Xeon E5/E7 v2-v4 hosts. My first fix was wrong. The stall looked like a network problem, so I assumed the vmxnet3 kext was failing to load during install and swapped those hosts to e1000-82545em . Shipped it. Then issue #103 came back from someone with the actual hardware: vmxnet3 got network fine, and e1000-82545em did not attach at all. I had made it worse. The real cause is two layers down. Those chips are genuine HEDT parts with dual-socket / multi-die topology, and -cpu host leaks that topology straight through to the guest. Pair it with a MacPro7,1 SMBIOS, which macOS treats as multi-socket capable, and XNU's scheduler livelocks under heavy multithreaded IO. The installer copy phase is exactly that workload. The fix is to stop passing the host topology through: _XEON_HEDT_PATTERN = re . compile ( r " Xeon.*E[57][ -]*\d+ *v([234]) " , re . IGNORECASE ) def _xeon_hedt_cpu_model ( model_name : str ) -> str : match = _XEON_HEDT_PATTERN . search ( model_name ) if not match : return "" if match . group ( 1 ) == " 2 " : return " Haswell-noTSX,model=158,stepping=3 " return " Broadwell-noTSX,model=158 " Lesson I keep relearning: the symptom showed up at the network layer, the cause lived in CPU topology. Guessing from the symptom cost me a release. 2. The VM boots into Recovery forever Symptom: Fresh install finishes. Every subsequent boot lands b

Most "why Proxmox" content in 2025-2026 is a migration story driven by Broadcom's ESXi pricing changes. The author had a working VMware stack and got priced out. I'm not that author. I evaluated both, picked Proxmox in 2024, and built on it without ever running ESXi in production. Two years in, I'd make the same call. It reads as either incompetent or contrarian until the rest of the post lands. Here's the reasoning. The three reasons it was the easy call 1. LXC and KVM in one host Most workloads in this homelab are LXCs. Pi-hole, Vaultwarden, Authelia, Traefik, the monitoring stack, GitLab CE itself, all containers sharing the host kernel. A few things need full VM isolation (the NAS guest, Proxmox Backup Server, the Home Assistant OS appliance). Same hypervisor, same CLI, same web UI for both shapes of workload. The alternative is ESXi for the VMs and a separate toolchain (containerd, Docker, Kubernetes, take your pick) for the containers. That's two backup pipelines, two HA stories, two places for config drift to surprise you at 2 AM. pct exec 254 systemctl status authelia and qm start 189 are the same shape. New hires don't have to learn one tool for containers and a different one for VMs. 2. Proxmox Backup Server beats the free Veeam alternative Chunk-level deduplication. Backups across guests and across time share storage. A nightly backup of all 11 LXCs and 2 VMs runs in about ten minutes and adds a few hundred MB of new chunks, because most of the content is the same as yesterday. Cluster-scheduled. One job definition runs across every node in the cluster. No per-node cron, no manual rotation when a node moves. Restore to a different storage class. A backup taken from local-lvm on the G7 restores onto ZFS on a G5 cluster node without conversion gymnastics. Veeam Community Edition is the free comparison. It works. It also caps repository size, doesn't dedup at the chunk level, and lacks the cluster-aware scheduling that makes PBS feel like a built-in feature

Originally published on bckinfo.com How to Install VMware ESXi: Step-by-Step Bare-Metal Setup Guide Table of Contents ESXi vs. VMware Workstation: Which One Do You Need Hardware Compatibility Check Downloading the ESXi Installer Creating a Bootable USB Installer BIOS/UEFI Preparation Installing ESXi: Step by Step Configuring the Management Network Accessing the vSphere Host Client Creating Your First Virtual Machine Post-Installation Checklist Common Issues and Quick Fixes Closing Notes If you've read our complete guide to VMware virtualization , you already know ESXi is the bare-metal hypervisor underneath vSphere. This guide is the hands-on counterpart — installing ESXi directly on physical server hardware, from hardware compatibility checks through booting your first virtual machine. ESXi vs. VMware Workstation: Which One Do You Need Before starting, it's worth confirming you actually want ESXi and not VMware Workstation. They solve different problems: VMware Workstation is a Type-2 hypervisor — it installs on top of an existing OS (Windows, Linux, macOS via Fusion). Good for running a VM or two on a laptop or desktop you also use for everything else. If that's your case, our guide on installing VMware Workstation on CentOS Stream 10 is the right starting point instead. ESXi is a Type-1, bare-metal hypervisor — it installs directly on the hardware with no host OS underneath it. This is the right choice for a dedicated server running multiple VMs, a home lab, or anything that needs to scale beyond "a VM running alongside my desktop." The rest of this guide assumes you're installing on dedicated hardware that won't run anything else. Hardware Compatibility Check This is the step most worth not skipping. ESXi has a defined Hardware Compatibility List (HCL), and installing on unlisted hardware is the single biggest source of installation failures and post-install driver issues. Check your exact server model and component list (NIC, storage controller) against VMware'

Most organizations still think of the hypervisor as a resource abstraction layer. CPU. Memory. Storage. The platform that decides where workloads run. That mental model is increasingly incomplete. Every major virtualization platform — vSphere, AHV, Proxmox — has been steadily accumulating policy enforcement responsibilities. The hypervisor isn't just deciding where workloads run. It's increasingly deciding what they're allowed to do. The Speed of the Shift Is the Real Story Virtualization practitioners already know security controls have moved downward through the stack. What's less appreciated is how compressed the most recent phase has been. For years, hypervisors enforced resource allocation. Within a single platform generation cycle, that same layer accumulated encryption policy enforcement, workload trust validation, microsegmentation, secure boot enforcement, host attestation, and workload isolation boundaries — not as optional add-ons, but as core platform capabilities. The perimeter-to-OS transition took decades. The hypervisor accumulated a comparable policy enforcement surface in the time between one major vSphere release and the next. That compressed timeline is what creates the ownership lag — the governance model adequate for a resource scheduler has not caught up to a platform that enforces organizational policy. The Hypervisor Now Makes Binding Decisions The distinction that matters: a platform that observes policy versus a platform that enforces it. The hypervisor is no longer observing. It is enforcing. VM fails attestation → workload does not start. Encryption policy mismatch → workload cannot migrate. Segmentation policy violation → communication blocked at the platform layer. Trust validation failure → host removed from workload eligibility. Those are not scheduling decisions. Those are governance outcomes. The workload doesn't get a vote. This is what makes the hypervisor governance infrastructure : infrastructure that directly enforces organiza