Pros:

• you run a home lab

Cons:

• you run a home lab

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.

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

[Thread #839 for this sub, first seen 29th Jun 2024, 15:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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.

For me, pros are:

• Fun to learn something new
• Easy to test different systems. For example, I can play with different router or NAS software without having a separate computer around.
• I’ve been able to create different “computers” that serve different needs and require different levels of security.
• Currently, a cluster is probably overkill, it was a fun experiment.

Cons

• Updating all the different systems can be a pain. I could probably automate it, but I haven’t made the time to learn it yet.
• As a beginner, I’m throwing a bunch of parts together and hoping it will work. I should probably be more strategic in my implementation, but I don’t know what to prioritize. I’m sure I’ll have to start over in the future.
• With the previous point, the storage setup doesn’t seem very intuitive. I probably need to set up that better.
• I haven’t quite figured out backups yet. My VM backups all seem too big. I need to figure that out and automate it.

Hope this is helpful.

If you know your way around Linux you most likely don’t need Proxmox and its pseudo-open-source… you can try Incus / LXD instead.

Avoid Proxmox and safe yourself a LOT of headaches down the line. Go with Debian 12 + Incus/LXC, it runs VMs and containers very well. Proxmox ships with an old kernel that is so mangled and twisted that they shouldn’t even be calling it a Linux kernel. Also their management daemons and other internal shenanigans will delay your boot and crash your systems under certain circumstances.

LXD/Incus provides a management and automation layer that really makes things work smoothly - essentially what Proxmox does but properly done. With Incus you can create clusters, download, manage and create OS images, run backups and restores, bootstrap things with cloud-init, move containers and VMs between servers (even live sometimes).

Another big advantage is the fact that it provides a unified experience to deal with both containers and VMs, no need to learn two different tools / APIs as the same commands and options will be used to manage both. Even profiles defining storage, network resources and other policies can be shared and applied across both containers and VMs.

I draw your attention to containers (not docker), LXC containers because for most people full virtualization isn’t even required. In a small homelab if you can have containers that behave like full operating systems (minus the kernel) including persistence, VMs might not be required. Either way LXD/Incus will allow for both and you can easily mix and match and use what you require for each use case. Hell, you can even run Docker inside an LXC container.

For eg. I virtualize the official HomeAssistant image with Incus because we all know how hard is to get that thing running, however my NAS / Samba shares are just a LXD Debian 12 container with Samba4, Nginx and FileBrowser. Same goes for torrent client that has its own container. Some other service I’ve exposed to the internet also runs a full VM for isolation.

Like Proxmox, LXD/Incus isn’t about replacing existing virtualization techniques such as QEMU, KVM and libvirt, it is about augmenting them so they become easier to manage at scale and overall more efficient. I can guarantee you that most people running Proxmox today it today will eventually move to Incus and never look back. It woks way better, true open-source, no bugs, no delayed security updates, no BS licenses and way less overhead.

Also, let’s consider something, why use Proxmox when half of it’s technology (the container part) was made by the same people who made LXD/Incus? I mean Incus is free, well funded and can be installed on a clean Debian system with way less overhead and also delivers both containers and VMs.

Yes, there’s an optional WebUI for it as well!

• Context on Incus vs LXD: https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/04/incus_lxd_fork/
• A sum of my experience with Proxmox over the years: https://lemmy.world/comment/7476411

Some documentation for you:

• https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/
• https://github.com/lxc/incus
• https://wiki.debian.org/Incus
• https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/installing/
• https://github.com/canonical/lxd
• https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/definition/LXD-Linux-container-hypervisor

I don’t prefer proxmox, but I will say that when you have even a machine with 8 or 16gb RAM, virtualizing a workload on it just makes sense. At that point the cost is 12% resources, and the benefits IMHO farrr outweight that.

Incus is way easier to work with than Proxmox, and it sits on your OS of choice instead of being the OS you must use. For home use it’s way easier to use with the web ui, it even has clustering if you want to go hard.

So you can install Incus when you want a VM/LXC container and not have to commit to a VM/LXC container OS from the start.

Also Proxmox free just had a bad update that björked some stuff if you updated when it was live. Proxmox free is rolling and apparently lacks basic sanity checks for updates.