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Pros and cons of Proxmox in a home lab? (lemmy.linuxuserspace.show)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi all. I was curious about some of the pros and cons of using Proxmox in a home lab set up. It seems like in most home lab setups it’s overkill. But I feel like there may be something I’m missing. Let’s say I run my home lab on two or three different SBCs. Main server is an x86 i5 machine with 16gigs memory and the others are arm devices with 8 gigs memory. Ample space on all. Wouldn’t Proxmox be overkill here and eat up more system resources than just running base Ubuntu, Debian or other server distro on them all and either running the services needed from binary or docker? Seems like the extra memory needed to run the Proxmox software and then the containers would just kill available memory or CPU availability. Am I wrong in thinking that Proxmox is better suited for when you have a machine with 32gigs or more of memory and some sort of base line powerful cpu?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months 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.