Idea: change how servers are provisionned by allowing proxmox vm/container

[romain-neil]

After discuting with some friends since few years ago, I think it would be great to have the capacity to choose/configure pterodactyl to use proxmox (PVE) hypervisor APIs to create container/VM that are hosting the game servers, instead of having all the containers inside the same pterodactyl server.
This would allow us to better manage the game server loads.

For implementation details, I suggest that we can configure inside pterodactyl on which server we can create the container (with api url, credentials, ...) and report these informations inside the ptero api

[cesarmr-github]

In my opinion, this kind of approach would make more sense if it were implemented by a hosting provider as part of their own internal platform or custom panel, rather than being built directly into Pterodactyl.
Most Pterodactyl users are running on VPSs or dedicated servers and don’t operate a full hypervisor environment like Proxmox. Because of that, native support for managing VMs or containers through a hypervisor API would likely benefit only a small group of users, while adding significant complexity to the project.

[DaneEveritt]

I have literally no experience doing this, so you're going to need to break this down into more detail as to how you envision it all working. I don't necessarily need nitty-gritty details, but a basic idea of what those APIs would look like, some type of diagram of what the deployment and networking looks like, and so on.

The less I understand about something the less likely it is to end up in the software since I end up being the one to maintain it. Can't maintain what I don't understand 😆

[romain-neil]

For simplicity, I would say that we have new tables that record the following informations :

• The hypervisor api url / api key / type (proxmox only)
• A table that make the join between a server (game type, and so on) and the hypervisor (game_hypervisor)

The use of the "join" table allow the Wings backend to send the commands to the server where is it located (imagine a proxy)

[DaneEveritt]

I guess I'm more confused as to how this is being implemented. Are you suggesting creating a hypervisor instance per-server that runs Docker and then runs the server "like normal" within that hypervisor's Docker instance?

Or is the intention that instead of using Docker you'd just run the game on the hypervisor itself?

[romain-neil]

I see that I was not clear ^^, the tables I suggest is for storing the configuration (which game server is hosted on which server).
The hypervisor take care of hosting the container, created by pterodactyl control plane. Once created, the wings api take care of sending the commands (stop/start/info/..) to the corresponding container

[romain-neil]

I think more about this problem and I think this could be achieved by using Kubernetes to provision the different containers, this should be more easy as k8s will handle the pods itself