Last time (somewhere around 2023) there was an option on Scaleway to install Proxmox 7 directly from appliance. There was also possiblity to use Debian 11 and install Proxmox atop of it. This time (2024/Nov) there is no direct install and installing on Debian gives me some unexpected errors which I do not want to overcome as it should work just like that.
But there is option to use Dell’s iDRAC interface for remote access.
Imagine you would like run 2 x vCPU and 4 GB RAM virtual machine. Which service provider do you choose? Azure, AWS or Hetzner?
With AWS you pay 65 USD (c5.large instance… and by the way why this is called large at all?). You pick Microsoft Azure you pay 36 Euro (B2s). If you would pick DigitealOcean then you pay 24 USD (noname “droplet”). Choosing Scaleway you pay 19 Euro (PLAY2-NANO compute instance in Warsaw DC). However, with Hetzner Cloud you pay as little as 4.51 Euro (CX22 virtual server). How is that even possible? So it goes like this (converted from USD to Euro):
With different offers for vCPU and RAM the propotion stays similar, especially in Microsoft Azure. Both Azure and AWS are big-tech companies which make billions of dollars on this offer. Companies like DigitalOcean, Scaleway and Hetzner cannot be called big-tech, because they are much narrower in their businesses and do not offer that high amount of features in their platforms, contrary to Azure and AWS which have hundreds of features available. Keep in mind that this is very synthetic comparison, but if you would like to go with that specific use case scenario you will see the difference.
Every platform has its best. AWS was among the first on the market. Microsoft Azure has its gigantic platform and it is the most recognizable. DigitalOcean, Scaleway and Hetzner are many more (like Rackspace for instance) are the most popular, reliable among other non-big-tech dedicated servers and cloud services providers. I personally especially like services from Hetzner, not only because of their prices but excellent customer service, which is hard to offer within Microsoft or Amazon. If you want somehow more personal approach then go for non-big-tech solutions.
Important notice: any kind of recommendations here are my personal opinion and has not been backup-up by any of those providers.
Bare metal servers offered at Scaleway are at reasonable prices, which can be compared to those on Hetzner. You even get Proxmox installation by default contrary to Hetzner were you need to install Debian first. To setup Proxmox with one public IP anf pfSense with another one you need to order Flexible IP and request for virtual MAC address. Remember that on Scaleway’s flexible IPs gateway is fixed and it is 62.210.0.1. Then for the network configuration:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eno1
iface eno1 inet manual
iface eno2 inet manual
auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet manual
address x.x.x.x/24
gateway y.y.y.y
bridge-ports eno1
bridge-stp off
bridge-fd 0
pointopoint y.y.y.y
hwaddress a:b:c:d:e:f
up route add -net a.a.a.a netmask b.b.b.b gw y.y.y.y dev vmbr0
up ip route add z.z.z.z/32 dev vmbr0
# PUBLIC
auto vmbr1
iface vmbr1 inet static
address 10.0.0.1/8
bridge-ports eno2
bridge-stp off
bridge-fd 0
# LAN
x.x.x.x is primary Proxmox public IP. y.y.y.y is its gateway (with a.a.a.a network with b.b.b.b netmask). z.z.z.z is then your secondary public IP (flexible IP) for pfSense firewall. As you can see, there are two network adapters, eno1 and eno2. First one (eno1) is used for public IPs and second one (eno2) is for internal network only. For some reason the same configuration as on Hetzner, concerning LAN networking, does not work, so there are few changes there over that configuration at Hetzner.