I run the immich container stack on a vm with 4GiB memory and 2 cores, with db on local disk and external libraries over smb, and it runs perfectly fine. I offload the machine learning jobs to another sometimes-on machine, sometimes, but don’t really need to unless I’m dumping thousands of new images into the external library at a time and want it all to process quickly.
Looks like both of your vms probably have the same mac address - the 172 ip address is likely a self-assigned fallback when the dhcp server replies to the second vm that it can’t give it an address. Double-check and make sure the mac address in each vm’s proxmox network adapter settings match your pfsense dhcp reservations, and let me know if that resolves it.
The grub command line options at the beginning of this article might help get your system booted without the memory deadlock, and then you can make further adjustments as needed: https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/debian-13-minimal-guide-reduce-ram-to-38mb-and-disk-to-275mb
Alpine is great for exactly this kind of thing, though, and I use it often in embedded environments where resources are at a premium. Just do some good reading up on it beforehand, since can be very different if you’re used to debian and systemd.
The ongoing maintenance for this would be a bit of a pain, since you’d need to recompile every update on a separate machine with enough memory to do so, package it up into a .deb, and distribute and install it everywhere.
I do this on a little raspberry pi cluster and it works, but it’s work.
More laws written by people who have zero fucking idea what they’re writing laws about.
Been a rough few weeks to be a linux sysadmin, I tell ya