I want to go 100% the other direction. Docker in a VM. Much easier to maintain when you need to move your VMs between hosts. I did do another year of the free K8s account, but I had a goal to get off the service. I don't like having a remote dependency on licensing, free or not. "Free" has gone away far too many times in my 40 years of always online computing services.

With AWS itself, you can setup the different storage tiers, and the magic in the back end we never see is the data gets transferred off magically to the different tiers based on the policies set. 100% transparent to any level of paying customer outside AWS. How does this kind of thing work in our labs? Not many of us, I'm sure have tape backup, potentially different NAS devices, so I could understand shipping content to a uni-directional mount or whatever. I'm just curious why you wouldn't keep the data "live" and close to your living systems to get the data you need, when you need it? In my day to day, I don't ship offline (bad sysadmin) because I don't want to pay a third party to borrow their hard drive for the few days they're online... I have an 8-bay Drobo I can hook up, populated with 2 (or is it 4?) TB drives that I can throw archive content I "REALLY" need to backup, but, that'd solve one of two tiers that isn't the "hot" content.

I'm probably not going to use this. It's not automatic, and I have other tooling that'll do the work for me as far as documentation is concerned, and VMs come and go sometimes. Not to mention, there's a good chunk of data that I need already on proxmox dashboard, such as the VM name (Its name always defines its purpose), its IP (If it's not there, I install the agent). So I already have MOST of the information I need when I'm looking at ProxMox, which is really infrequent anyways. I also really dislike having large images in what should be a "notebook" field. I prefer simplicity over copyright infringement for using another companies content without their direct permission, so images are out of the question for me. (I know, you used images and HTML as an example -- the content can be anything) What would change my mind though is when you made mention in your three paragraphs in the "External Documentation Tool", which made me think of my source of truth, phpIPAM.... What caught my attention was the idea that a generic template could be made that's stored on github. Semaphore can easily do a pull or wget on the template, ask ProxMox for its relevant information, such as all the VMs on the cluster, run a port scan on the machine internally, document what is open, generate the report based on the template, then submit the generated notes to Proxmox for that specific VM it just scanned. I can convince Semaphore to run the job daily or on command and all those notes are immediately updated. As a bonus, if I DO have some special notes, if I add VM specific information I want into a text file (Based on either VM ID or the hostname, undecided which is better since either can change as time goes on, BUT, the fact that they exist is telling right there) I can throw that in a file, and that gets seeded into the template as well. So why don't I do all that? ... well.... First paragraph, really... I have most of the information i want built right into the dashboard. Anything else I'd want to talk to the server itself. I rarely ever populate notes in ProxMox since VMs can be destroyed and rebuilt and I also don't look at the interface except when I want to build or destroy a machine, or I need to do some kind of maintenance. I'm not in there for reading notes, I'm there to do work. Notes are done in IPAM based on what fields I find relevant to remember. With my (yet to do) project of getting another reverse proxy service going, I'll have the port information right there in ipam anyways.

My Dell servers already have IDRACs (Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller) of various versions. And I also have an 8-port VGA based KVM hooked to them. I'm rarely ever more than a 5 minute drive, or a 15 second walk away from my servers when I need to do something to them while standing in front of them, so I RARELY ever have to concern myself with the DRAC cards. That said, I've had to use them in a commercial sense for work. This is fantastic technology. I wish this was standard on every machine, but, then, it opens a HUGE hole for security. There are also individual and multi port network capable KVMs one can purchase as well that will do the same kind of thing. Separate device, you can remote to the KVM, have control of the PC that its hooked to (Or in the multi port version, change to whatever machine you need) and do whatever it is you need. For power management, though, you do have to open the case and hook into the front panel leads which depending on the machine could be interesting.

Retro stuffs. Planning another show for Sept 2026 with a couple of other guys. I'm bringing an AMD 486, Pentium 1 through 4, setting up for some good ol' URTGOTY99, Doom, and a few other networking games. Plus bringing my MiSTer. So home lab stuff, not a lot in plan, except maybe gearing towards the full OS backup with ProxMox Backup. {sigh} One of my servers locked up over the weekend, not sure why. Nothing on screen, I just had to power cycle.