5 ways Proxmox simplifies home lab management

Table of Contents

Key Takeaways

Proxmox offers an intuitive web UI and is beginner-friendly, perfect for managing home labs.
Proxmox provides solid backup, clustering, security options, and supports GPU passthrough.
Proxmox is compatible with ZFS, offers LXC container support, and delivers solid performance with KVM.

Containers and virtual machines are the quintessential aspects of home labs. But when you’re just starting your self-hosting journey, building and managing your own server can seem like quite a hurdle, especially since it’s possible to damage your daily driver by accidentally messing up the network and BIOS settings.

But for those with a spare PC lying around, you can put it to good use by installing a bare-metal virtualization platform. Proxmox is my preferred OS for managing home labs, and here are five reasons why you should go with it if you want a simple and painless experience.

5 cool Proxmox projects you should check out if you’re into coding

Proxmox may be well-known for its home lab-oriented tools, but it’s also a great companion for coders and programmers

5 Intuitive web UI

Linux experts will feel right at home with the Debian CLI tools

One of the most beginner-friendly aspects of Proxmox is its orderly user interface. Unlike the UIs of TrueNAS Scale or even Unraid, Proxmox has a gentle learning curve, as most of the settings are clearly laid out in the main dashboard.

Proxmox also has its roots in Debian, so you’ll feel right at home with the command-line interface on the host machine and the Shell utility on the web UI if you’re familiar with Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS, Q4OS, or other Debian-based distros. But don’t let its simple UI fool you. Proxmox packs plenty of features under the hood…

4 Solid backup, clustering, and security options

You can even set up GPU passthrough!

Setting proper backups and hardening the security of your server is one of the most essential facets of managing your home lab. Thankfully, Proxmox simplifies the maintenance aspect by providing myriads to safeguard your precious self-hosted apps and services.

The platform also supports enterprise-grade features like VLANs, Ceph storage, and high availability clustering – without charging an extra penny. If you’re coming from Type-2 hypervisors like VMware Workstation Pro and VirtualBox, you’ll be surprised to know that you can leverage entire graphics cards inside virtual machines using GPU passthrough.

3 Compatible with the ZFS file system

Perfect for running NAS on your Proxmox server

Executing the command to encrypt a ZFS pool

NAS, or Network-Attached Storage, can serve as a great addition to your home lab environment when you need to save and sync files across your server. But when you’re just starting out, managing multiple devices (and the cables) can be a little cumbersome. Thankfully, you can create a fully virtualized NAS setup on top of your Proxmox home lab without cutting any corners.

That’s because Proxmox supports ZFS, which is arguably one of the best file systems for a storage server. If you wish to build a dedicated NAS but are hesitant to add even more devices to your beginner home lab setup, you can deploy a TrueNAS Scale VM and pass your ZFS datasets to the virtual machine as virtual disks.

2 LXC container support, with easy-to-use Turnkey templates

Or you run tteck’s simple scripts to deploy your favorite services

Since Proxmox has built-in provisions for LXC containers, you don’t have to create different virtual machines just to self-host a service or two. Sure, the LXC runtime may not be as popular as good ol’ Docker. But their low resource consumption makes them worthwhile for any home lab server.

What’s more, Proxmox lets you download a battalion of LXC container templates, each fine-tuned for a specific project. Thanks to genius developer tteck’s Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts, you can further reduce the complexity of deploying containers for self-hosted applications.

1 KVM delivers solid performance

And don’t forget the cool things you can pull off with nested virtualization

Whether you fall into the Type-2 hypervisor crowd or are a part of the Xen clan, there’s no denying that KVM delivers top-notch performance in virtualization workloads. With Proxmox built on the KVM hypervisor, you won’t have any issues running dedicated virtual machines on old systems.

From creating macOS VMs on top of an outdated Ryzen 5 1600 processor to running modern games on a virtualized instance of Windows 11 with the help of GPU passthrough, Proxmox is highly optimized for home lab workloads. If you’re as fond of wacky project ideas as I am, you can look into nested virtualization hijinks to manage mini-home labs inside your main server!

Proxmox is in a league of its own

After using multiple operating systems, ranging from the classical Windows 11 and Debian to Talos Linux and XCP-ng, Proxmox remains my favorite distro for home lab projects. It’s extremely simple to pick up for beginners, yet possesses enough advanced features to keep veterans hooked. Thanks to its thriving community, there’s a staggering number of ideas you can bring to life using Proxmox, making it the ideal home lab management platform for DIY enthusiasts and self-hosting aficionados.