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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/selfhosted

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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] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Incus or Proxmox (e.g., should I shift to Incus LTS or something?)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If incus works for yoy, use it. Proxmox locks you out of the option to choose your base server distros.

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

Ah, I was wondering which one you updated and it made your containers inaccessible!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Sorry, misunderstood. Proxmox Free broke my containers on updating a while ago.

Now I use Docker-style application containerizing, but I think LXC (the base technology powering Incus/LXD) is useful in a number of situations and perfectly viable for use. I think Incus-containerized applications are easier to upgrade individually (like software updates of your apps, no need to recreate the container image) and gives a closer to native experience of managing. You do lose out on automated deployment of applications from widely available image sources like docker.io, but the convenience-loss is minimal.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Good to know Proxmox’s bad updates are more pervasive than the latest bad update.

I have been able to install Docker in the LXC containers and pull images in with the normal commands. I do that container-in-container to get effectively rootless docker containers for stuff that I couldn’t figure out how to run rootless. So you don’t even lose out on docker if you’re determined! And as you said incus goes on any OS, you can docker just fine on the base OS of your choice and use incus for specific things!