Pros and cons of Proxmox in a home lab?

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.

some_guy , 6 days ago

Proxmox is available free. You pay for support and maybe other things with a license, but you can download it and give it a spin at no cost. I just switched to Proxmox around 1m ago when I restarted my homelab project after years on hiatus. I used to use Esxi before Broadcom bought VMware and decided to suck. I like it so far.

It might be overkill for your needs. I'm running it because I want to play with setting up and managing Win Server (I only have experience managing existing servers on Win), so there's a distinct reason for me to be on Proxmox even though I'm a Mac and Linux person. I agree that it might be overkill for your i5 if you only plan to run one Ubuntu instance on it. However, a lot of homelabbing is about having an environment to try out and learn new skills. If that's something that's interesting to you, it might be worthwhile.

Keep in mind that you could also run KVM for virtualization if you find reason for VMs. You're not limited to Proxmox. And if you see no need for VMs, you already have three devices to do the things you bought them to do.

possiblylinux127 , 6 days ago

For stability you want the enterprise subscription which is not free but is fairly reasonable

Decronym Bot , 6 days ago (edited 4 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

---

[Thread #839 for this sub, first seen 29th Jun 2024, 15:25]
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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.

LordCrom , 5 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 , 6 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 , 6 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 , 6 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 , 6 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 , 6 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.