Pros and cons of Proxmox in a home lab?

Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 111 points – 3 days ago

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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No way! For just 1 reason: I will have to learn another new thing and replace it in about 6 servers. I value my time and for now Proxmox is fine.

P.s. Incus seems nice though! NO, stop tempting me!!! I'm already in the rabbit hole with a gazilion of self hosted services and dozens piling up in the to do list 🙈🙈🙈

Well, I understand your POV... but real software freedom instead of messages asking you to buy a license and a questionable kernel is always a good choice :P

Does Incus support things like Kernel Samepage Merging? How does it handle Windows VMs? Does the WebUI give a nice and easy novnc window that just works?

Yes ksmtuned is your friend. For VMs it can be managed / enabled like any other Linux Kernel + QEMU/KVM running with KSM enabled.

On LXC containers it may be a bit harder as it depends a LOT, best results if you're using systemd both the host and containers. It may work out all out of the box or you'll have to resort to ksm_wrapper in both the Incus executable and the stuff running inside your containers.

Don't forget that:

KSM only operates on those areas of address space which an application has advised to be likely candidates for merging, by using the madvise(2) system call: int madvise(addr, length, MADV_MERGEABLE). https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt

How does it handle Windows VMs

As one would except from QEMU... https://blog.simos.info/how-to-run-a-windows-virtual-machine-on-incus-on-linux/

Does the WebUI give a nice and easy novnc window

Yes it works fine. https://youtu.be/wqEH_d8LC1k?feature=shared&t=508