Domino for Linux on Proxmox

Proxmox is a modern and very flexible virtualization environment that supports both full virtual machines and lightweight Linux containers.

Domino can be deployed as a standard VM using the usual best practices. However, Proxmox also offers a second option that can be interesting for more flexible or resource-efficient deployments: LXC containers. LXC uses the Proxmox host kernel directly and provides a thin virtualization layer with very low overhead.

Benefits of LXC on Proxmox

  • Very fast, template-based provisioning LXC containers start quickly and can be cloned from templates in seconds.

  • ZFS subvolumes instead of ZVOLs This allows more flexible and space-efficient storage management, including snapshots, replication, and compression.

  • Lower overhead than traditional VMs Ideal when running many smaller Domino servers for testing, clustering, or multi-tenant environments.

Special Considerations for LXC

LXC containers are not full VMs and impose certain capability and security restrictions by default. One practical issue is that the Domino WebKit tar files include very high user and group IDs, which causes extraction to fail inside LXC due to the UID/GID mapping restrictions.

By default, tar tries to restore the original owner. In an unprivileged LXC container, this is blocked.

Workaround

Before running the InstallAnywhere installer, export the following environment variable so tar does not attempt to restore ownership:

export TAR_OPTIONS=--no-same-owner

This ensures the WebKit tar files extract cleanly inside the container.