Bare metal o virtualized DSM?

[maxime]

Hi! I'm changing my hardware system and I purchased this motherboard: https://amzn.eu/d/dMCNKDd it has an Intel N5105 CPU, 2xNVME, 6xSata and 4x2.5Gb/s NIC. I will have to transfer the 6 SATA disks from my actual XPenology DS918+ DSM 7.2.1, to this new hardware. The new platform I chosed is DS920+. However, I am not sure whether to install the new XPEnology in Bare metal or virtualized on ProxMox VE 8: I have already tested both solutions and everything works very well. Obviously in ProxMox I installed the disks using passthrough. In bare metal I would boot from a USB stick, while in ProxMox I would boot using an NVME disk (which I would also use as a cache disk). What do you recommend me to do? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the 2 solutions? Thank you!

Edited June 16, 2024 by maxime

[gadreel]

Every member will have it's own opinion regarding this matter. Personally I have been using the VM approach for so many years mostly due to the fact that I have 16c/32t CPUs. It will be "stupid" for baremetal to use so many cores unless you want to use Synology's Virtual Machine Manager which again I believe Proxmox is a better software for this job. Therefore I am using Proxmox 8 for my Synology NAS I just need only 4 vcores and I can use the rest of the cores for other type of VMs.

 

With VM in the past you had so much flexibility especially when it came to drivers but I believe now the community has grown so much and due to the effort of many people here they made available so many drivers for so many hardware therefore it does not matter.

 

Regarding the USB stick, all I can say, even Unraid is still using USB to boot the OS into the memory. It's not that bad...

[maxime]

Thank you so much for your opinion. In fact my CPU only has 4 cores and all the drivers work well in bare metal. I think that I will install it in bare metal at the moment, then if necessary, I can pass it into a ProxMox virtual machine.