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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[–] TheMightyCat@ani.social 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm selfhosting Forgejo and i don't really see the benefit of migrating to a container, i can easily install and update it via the package manager so what benefit does containerization give?

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[–] Kurious84@lemmings.world 2 points 1 month ago

Anything you want dedicated performance on or require fine tuning for a specific performance use cases. Theyre out there.

[–] eleitl@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago

Obviously, you host your own hypervisor on own or rented bare metal.

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

My file server is also the container/VM host. It does NAS duties while containers/VMs do the other services.

OPNsense is its own box because I prefer to separate it for security reasons.

Pihole is on its own RPi because that was easier to setup. I might move that functionality to the AdGuard plugin on OPNsense.

[–] HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

My reasons for keeping OpnSense on bare metal mirror yours. But additionally I don't want my network to take a crap because my proxmox box goes down.

I constantly am tweaking that machine...

[–] Routhinator@startrek.website 2 points 1 month ago

I'm running Kube on baremetal.

[–] bhamlin@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

It depends on the service and the desired level of it stack.

I generally will run services directly on things like a raspberry pi because VMs and containers offer added complexity that isn't really suitable for the task.

At work, I run services in docker in VMs because the benefits far outweigh the complexity.

[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

All I have is Minecraft and a discord bot so I don't think it justifies vms

[–] kossa@feddit.org 2 points 1 month ago

Well, that is how I started out. Docker was not around yet (or not mainstream enough, maybe). So it is basically a legacy thing.

My main machine is a Frankenstein monster by now, so I am gradually moving. But since the days when I started out, time has become a scarce resource, so the process is painfully slow.

[–] OnfireNFS@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

This reminds me of a question I saw a couple years ago. It was basically why would you stick with bare metal over running Proxmox with a single VM.

It kinda stuck with me and since then I've reimaged some of my bare metal servers with exactly that. It just makes backup and restore/snapshots so much easier. It's also really convenient to have a web interface to manage the computer

Probably doesn't work for everyone but it works for me

[–] misterbngo@awful.systems 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Your phrasing of the question implies a poor understanding. There's nothing preventing you from running containers on bare metal.

My colo setup is a mix of classical and podman systemd units running on bare metal, combined with a little nginx for the domain and tls termination.

I think you're actually asking why folks would use bare metal instead of cloud and here's the truth. You're paying for that resiliency even if you don't need it which means that renting the cloud stuff is incredibly expensive. Most people can probably get away with a$10 vps, but the aws meme of needing 5 app servers, an rds and a load balancer to run WordPress has rotted people. My server that I paid a few grand for on eBay would cost me about as much monthly to rent from aws. I've stuffed it full of flash with enough redundancy to lose half of it before going into colo for replacement. I paid a bit upfront but I am set on capacity for another half decade plus, my costs are otherwise fixed.

[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Your phrasing of the question implies poor understanding.

Your phrasing of the answer implies poor understanding. The question was why bare metal vs containers/VMs.

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Depends on the application. My NAS is bare metal. That box does exactly one thing and one thing only, and it's something that is trivial to setup and maintain.

Nextcloud is running in docker (AIO image) on bare metal (Proxmox OS) to balance performance with ease of maintenance. Backups go to the NAS.

Everything else is running on in a VM which makes backups and restores simpler for me.

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