In the next ~6 months I’m going to entirely overhaul my setup. Today I have a NUC6i3 running Home Assistant OS, and a NUC8i7 running OpenMediaVault with all the usual suspects via Docker.
I want to upgrade hardware significantly, partially because I’d like to bring in some local LLM. Nothing crazy, 1-8B models hitting 50tps would make me happy. But even that is going to mean a beefy machine compared to today, which will be nice for everything else too of course.
I’m still all over the place on hardware, part of what I’m trying to decide is whether to go with a single machine for everything or keep them separate.
Idea 1 is a beefy machine and Proxmox with HA in a VM, OMV or TrueNAS in another, and maybe a 3rd straight Debian to separate all the Docker stuff. But I don’t know if I want to add the complexity.
Idea 2 would be beefy machine for straight OMV/TrueNAS and run most stuff there, and then just move HA over to the existing i7 for more breathing room (mostly for Frigate, which could also separate to other machine I guess).
I hear a lot of great things about Proxmox, but I’m not sold that it’s worth the new complexity for me. And keeping HA (which is “critical” compared to everything else) separated feels like a smart choice. But keeping it on aging hardware diminishes that anyway, so I don’t know.
Just wanting to hear various opinions I guess.
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In my opinion, Proxmox is worth it for two reasons:
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Easy high-availability setup and control
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Proxmox Backup Server
Those two are what drove me to switch from KVM, and I don’t regret it at all. PBS truly is a fantastic piece of software.
Upvoted for PBS alone. Incremental backups that are rock solid mean you can completely brick your server and have it back to normal in minutes
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The one factor that no one seems to have mentioned yet that is key for many of us is LEARNING …
It’s a great way to learn virtualization and containerization
I use it exclusively to run Linux containers, it makes it very convenient to backup and restore as well as replicate environments.
We are now migrating our lab at work away from VMW
Best thing to do is give it a go and see what shakes out OP. I absolutely love both my Proxmox boxes. In my humble opinion, Proxmox was an easier set up, and the possibilities are endless really. It’s a solid freemium product. Couple it with the extensive Helper Scripts, and Jack’s a doughnut, Bob’s your uncle.
Do you need clusters that can failure ver from one machine to another? Is yes, proxmox is good. If no, there are less complex options.
I did it purely so I could fully back up my server VM and move it to new hardware when I wanted to upgrade. I just have to install Proxmox, attach the NAS, and pull the VM backup. And just like that everything is back to running just as it was before the upgrade! Now just faster and more energy efficient!
Don’t use Proxmox, use incus. It’s way easier to run and doesn’t give a care about your storage.
I’m running Proxmox and hate it. I still recommend it for what you are trying to do. I think it would work quite nicely. Three of my four nodes have llama.cpp VMs hosting OpenAI-compatible LLM endpoints (llama-server) and I run Claude Code against that using a simple translation proxy.
Proxmox is very opinionated on certain aspects and I much prefer bare metal k8s for my needs.
Proxmox is a convenient gui wrapper around libvirt but you can do everything without it.
For me, I’m Team Proxmox. It’s just easy to spin up containers for pretty much anything I need. No need for the resource overhead of a full-on virtual machine if I simply need to run a LAMP app. Anything you really have an issue transitioning from Docker to LXC can still be run inside a container with Docker installed. And if you need to set up a VM for Windows or pfSense or some other OS for whatever reason, it’s insanely easy to do.
I use Proxmox for Work and Hyper-V at home. Looking forward to retiring my old Hyper-V host and replace it with Proxmox because Hyper-V is a pain.
Virtualization really helps with reliability. In particular, by allowing you to quickly take snapshots before doing anything destructive and by streamlining backup and recovery.
I like ProxMox too, I’m quite happy that I dove in with it. Just one word of warning - if you mount a drive volume in a container, destroy the container and restore it from a backup, it wipes out the mounted drive. I, uh, lost a bunch of data that way. Not super important data, but still.
I’m still glad I went with ProxMox though. It makes spinning up something a breeze, and I also went with HA in a VM, and another Debian VM for Docker, and a bunch of random LXCs.
Is this separate from a bind mount? Cause that doesn’t happen with bind mounts.
Yeah, not a bind mount. There was a warning, but I was restoring a ton of LXCs and clicked through the warning too fast. My fault, I’m not super sore about it, just warning others as a service to prevent what happened to me!
Fair enough!
