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?

  • peregus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    5 months ago

    I run it on a 4GB Fujitsu Futro S920! 😆 All the RAM seems to be used by 3 VMs. Some SWAP is been used, ok, but the Proxmox overhead doesn’t seem that much.

    • Possibly linuxEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      Just wait until you get a few machines. You can live transfer things and dynamically allocate resources.

      • peregus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        61·
        5 months ago

        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 🙈🙈🙈

        • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
          44·
          5 months ago

          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

          • kitnaht@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            5 months ago

            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?