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?
i played around with Incus yesterday on one of my VPSs that I really don’t care about. I did find it really interesting. But im just wondering if its still a bit too much for what i use my home lab for (running local services like jellyfin, gitea, etc.). I would prefer to containerize all of those, but unless im misunderstanding something somewhere (and I probably am), running Incus to then run another instances of ubuntu 22.04 (or whatever) so i can set up Jellyfin or Gitea inside of that seems like a bit of overkill. However, as im trying to get nextcloud set up and running, having it exposed to the internet would mean spousal factor would go way up. Honestly they are about to kill me for using pihole, so having them have to turn on tailscale to connect to nextcloud, well sometimes it feels like its asking too much. So this is where running something in an isolated container would make me feel a bit more at ease. ah if only my spouse would just learn to turn on tailscale when they need it, but i don’t see that happening any time soon.
I do use it to hold internet-exposed things in LXC containers to sidestep having to figure out how to not run things as Docker root.
You do not need it for everything, but since it’s not an OS that makes it your everything, that’s ok! Run Docker containers as you need, put internet-exposed ones in an LXC container, put home assistant in a VM because it’s special.