Pros and cons of Proxmox in a home lab?

fortera , 5 days ago

I use Proxmox/virtualisation because I want to be able to run services within their own OS. I’ve got a VM dedicated to docker both at home and in my colocation, since a lot of services I’m happy to just chuck on there, but there’s others with more complex setups, and other services/systems that just running them in docker isn’t an option.

Pika , 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

I’m currently running proxmox on a 32 gig server running a ryzen 5600 G, it’s going fine the containers don’t actually use all that much RAM and personally I’m actually seeing a better benchmarks than I did when I just ran as a Bare Bones Ubuntu server, my biggest issue has actually been a larger IO strain than anything, because it’s a lot more IO heavy now since everything’s containerized. I think I easily could run it with a lower amount of ram I would just have to turn off some of the more RAM intensive items

As for if I regret changing, no way Jose, I absolutely love the ability of having everything containerized because I can set things up how I want it when I want it and if I end up screwing something up configuration wise or decide that I no longer need that service I can just nuke the container without having to remember well what did I install on this program so I can remove it and do other programs need this dependency to work. Plus while I haven’t tinkered as much in this area, you can hard set what resources you want a lot to each instance, so if you have a program like say a pi hole that you know is never going to use x amount of resources to be able to appropriately work you can restrict what it can do so if something does go wrong with it it doesn’t use all of your system resources

The biggest con out of it is probably having to figure out how to do the networking side because every container is going to have a different IP address, I found using a web dashboard is my friend because I can have heimdel tell me where all my services are and I just have to click the icon to bring me to the right IP address, it took a lot of work to figure out how it’s operational and how to get it working, but the benefits I’ve gotten of having it is amazing. Just make sure you have a spare disk to temporarily clone partitions to because it’s extremly difficult to use existing disks in the machine. I’ve been slowly going one at a time copying it over to an external drive nuking the and then reinitializing the disc as part of the proxmox lvm and then copying the data back over onto their appropriate image file.

specialseaweed , 6 days ago

I used Proxmox for awhile, then went to Unraid. I learned a lot using Proxmox but for ease of homelabbing, it’s tough to beat Unraid. It depends on what you’re wanting from your lab.

Decronym Bot , 7 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
HA	Home Assistant automation software
~	High Availability
IP	Internet Protocol
LTS	Long Term Support software version
LXC	Linux Containers
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
NFS	Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
ZFS	Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

---

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LordCrom , 6 days ago

I use it on reclaimed hardware … Works great for me. Has all the features you’d want for a home lab, and I run a few production hosts there as well

possiblylinux127 , 6 days ago

You need Proxmox

Seriously though it is nice to have

rutrum , 7 days ago

It seemed nice at first, but one major issue: GPU passthrough was a nightmare. It cant be done in the UI and I didnt understand fully how it worked. There are many different tutorials not by promox that are outdated or may not work. It was frustrating enough I jumped to NixOS. Other hiccups included having to go to the terminal to passthrough drives for openmediavault, but that one was kind of straightforward atleast, and it worked first time.

In hindsight, I didnt actually need to virtualize everything at that level, so I never really had a good use case for it anyway. I use containers over entire VMs.

monkeyman512 , 7 days ago

I think GPU passthrough has improved since you have used it. Some command line prep work is still necessary, but the passthrough config is done in the GUI.

Swarfega , 7 days ago

I did it a week ago and it was just a case of passing through the video card. I came across a lot of guides and they were all in the CLI. I assume things have improved or maybe it differs per card. I was just using onboard graphics from an N100 CPU.

philpo , 7 days ago

A lot of guides are still for Proxmox 7 or even 6 on that matter.

Proxmox 8 has changed a lot in that regard.

possiblylinux127 , 6 days ago

The onboard iGPU doesn’t need anything special once you turn on IOMMU. You just click add ePCI device.

possiblylinux127 , 6 days ago

It really depends on the hardware. Also PVE 8 adds some improvements. I would just follow the wiki.

habitualTartare , 7 days ago

I’m using a commercial desktop with an i5 Sandy bridge. I maxed out to 32Gb of ram only because I’m running trueNAS, debian with containers, and home assistant. Most RAM goes to trueNAS and trueNAS doesn’t accurately report ram. For CPU, mostly just task limited but I don’t really think thats a proxmox issue. Obviously it’s not going to support an enterprise or even small business but it works for what I need of less than 4 users on my budget.

Proxmox doesn’t really ask for much but I probably would recommend docker for your arm devices.