Pros and cons of Proxmox in a home lab?

possiblylinux127 , 6 days ago

You need Proxmox

Seriously though it is nice to have

WeirdGoesPro , 6 days ago

Using ProxMox has been extremely useful for me. It has allowed me to experiment with a lot more things than I ever did before—it is very easy to spin up a new VM to test things out.

I would recommend it to anyone running a home server.

machinin , 6 days ago

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.

umbrella , 6 days ago

a simple cron job pointing to an update.sh with an apt update && apt upgrade -y does the trick.

i wouldnt recommend you to completely automate it though

debian has unattended-updates by default and generally takes care of itself

monkeyman512 , 6 days ago

If you want to get things working then never "tinker" with things, maybe it's not worth it. But if you want to learn and be able to try new things it is really helpful. Having a new VM not breaking existing VMs reduces risk when trying something new.

Lifebandit666 , 6 days ago

It's the same reason I like running things in Docker; you can just wake up and read about something while enjoying your morning shit, then switch the computer on and try and boot it before that thing you're meant to be doing. If you can't do it you can just delete it and try again later.

I started Self Hosting with Proxmox 4 months ago and so far my only real snafu has been mapping drives directly to Proxmox with Fstab. If you're gonna do it, add "nofail" FFS.

I pass my drives through to my NAS VM to handle rather than Proxmox because it's easier to fix my NAS if it fucks up using Proxmox, than to try and fix a none-booting Proxmox.

Anyway now I'm at a point of stability and dim sat thinking about redoing it bare bones, but I love tinkering so I'm sure this is just the plateau before I discover something new to play with, so I'm keeping Proxmox

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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phucyall , 6 days ago

You need to understand what Proxmox gives you, which primarily is ability to run/manage/backup/etc VMs easily. If you don’t care about that, don’t use it. I have a fairly well spec’d desktop I use for homelab and I use proxmox because I often do experiments in VMs where snapshots and ability to jump to snapshots is essential. So is being able to spin up a new VM with new OS (like Windows) for example to do some testing. You can still do VMs without proxmox, but proxmox does make it a lot easier for living with daily.

TCB13 , 6 days ago

You need to understand what Proxmox gives you, which primarily is ability to run/manage/backup/etc VMs easily

Yeah and after understanding what it gives you then you move to Incus because while it might be a bit harder to setup it delivers around 80% of what Proxmox does without the overhead, mangled kernel and licensing issues.

https://cockpit-project.org/ also does VMs and can work for people without cluster needs.

snekerpimp , 6 days ago

Proxmox is based on kvm/qemu, and is very resource conservative. There is virtually no impact on performance due to the hypervisor, even on older processors. Scheduling on the cpu and hypervisor makes running multiple VMs at the same time trivial as well. RAM and I/O bandwidth are the two things that can affect performance. Running out of RAM due to too many VMs will grind you to a halt, but so would running too many applications or containers on bare metal. Running everything off of one spinning sata disk will make it impossible, but again, same downfall on bare metal.

Those minimal impacts to performance are a minor nuisance compared to the ability to run experiments and learn on sandboxed VMs. Now that TrueNAS has better virtualization support, it has caught my eye as a better homelab solution, but I will always have a proxmox server running somewhere in my stack just due to the versatility it gives me.

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.