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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] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think I was on a previous account the last time I saw you, glad to see you're still posting. You convinced me to move from Proxmox to Incus a while back. Sure, I had some growing pains, but it's pretty smooth now.

I like that I can switch out my distros underneath Incus instead of being stuck on one weird kernel. IME you were absolutely right about that. I'm getting into atomic distros to manage homelab machines. I would not be able to do that on Proxmox.

I also don't need to edit a giant Javascript file to remove a nag about enterprise software repos, which is nice.

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

I'm glad to know that I could help.

I like that I can switch out my distros underneath Incus instead of being stuck on one weird kernel

This is an interesting take that I never considered before, my experience (be it corporate or at home) is usually around Debian machines running Incus and I never had the need to replace the distro underneath it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I think it's an unusual case, but I wanted to bring it up to support your point about rejecting their kernel and distro. You can put Incus on a lot of different systems. Don't like systemd? Put it on Void. Want a declarative setup? NixOS. Minimalist? Alpine.

Do I want to maintain a full operating system just to run this one type of software? No, that's absurd. I want to choose the distro I want to work with and then have the software work on top of it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

You can put Incus on a lot of different systems. Don’t like systemd? Put it on Void. Want a declarative setup? NixOS. Minimalist? Alpine.

This is great, yeah.