this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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Pros and cons of Proxmox in a home lab? (lemmy.linuxuserspace.show)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

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] 1 points 5 months 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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (5 children)

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 There are many different tutorials not by promox that are outdated or may not work.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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months 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.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago

You need Proxmox

Seriously though it is nice to have

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