Which home server virtualization scheme to choose?

Question

linux

Hello. There is a handicraft home server from a disassembled laptop, all sorts of services such as transmission / owncloud / samba, etc. are running on it. All this works in one heap and somehow it's not very good - it's impossible to reinstall something "from scratch", say, owncloud + http-server + database. Therefore, I decided, before it's too late, to transfer the whole thing to virtual machines for more control, since the notebook Core i5 can do virtualization.
Drives: internal ~250GiB and external USB 1TB.
I will use QEMU / KVM - this platform seemed to me simpler and clearer than XEN. OS - ArchLinux. I have not yet decided how I will manage them - through libvirt + web interface or just console via ssh.
A few questions about the proper organization of this zoo:

1. Store images with virtual machines as files on one large partition or master lvm? What are its advantages / how is it more convenient than a simple image file?
   
2. Is it possible to mount a directory from the host system to a virtual machine? For example, a virtual machine on which a torrent downloader and samba are running must download torrents to an external drive and share it to the local network. I read that this is done only through network protocols - is there no other way, at worst, to transfer access directly to / dev / sdb *? I would not want to run samba on the host, because judging by the logs, she hangs it every few days with strange errors (and I want to check this by isolating her), and in general - only ssh and web-gui should go to the host to manage virtual machines.
   
3. By the way, about web-gui and managing virtual machines in general - what is the best way to do it for small tasks like two or three virtual machines? libvirt or something simpler?
   

Answer 1

You don't need KVM for things like this. Use lxc if you want to isolate services.

Answer 2

On the first question you have a clear misunderstanding. LVM does not relieve you of the need for a file system. It can simplify the manipulation of file systems. But, in the conditions of home file storage, the only requested function most often becomes the expansion of storage space by juggling (adding-replacing) physical HDD-SSD media. If you don't anticipate disk growth in the future, you won't get much benefit from using LVM.
The rest of your questions have already been answered. For your main Wishlist, it is better to use containers. But, if there is a strong desire to tinker with virtualization, then who will forbid you.

Answer 3

Proxmox VE