I used Proxmox for awhile, then went to Unraid. I learned a lot using Proxmox but for ease of homelabbing, it’s tough to beat Unraid. It depends on what you’re wanting from your lab.
I am in a bit of a funny position, I am volunteering in an underdeveloped country, and have my immich instance running at my in-laws. But I don't have access to my NAS. Backblaze would be ideal!
What have you done to run it there? Is it as easy as mounting juicefs, and pointing immich dirs there?
I have about 700gb that would have to be migrated, any ideas on that? Or would it be relatively transparent to immich just copy and pasting?
I was into low power homelabbing for a while - half a dozen Raspberry Pis - and it was great. But I'm an incessant tinkerer. I like to experiment with new tech all the time, and am always cloning various repos to try out new stuff. I was reaching a limit with how much I could achieve with just Docker alone, and I really wanted to virtualise my firewall/router. There were other drivers too. I really wanted to cut the streaming cord, and saving that monthly spend helped justify what came next.
I bought a pair of ex enterprise servers (HP DL360s) and jumped into Proxmox. I have an OPNsense VM for my firewall/router, and host over 40 Proxmox CTs, running (at a guess) around 60-70 different services across them.
I love it, because Proxmox gives me full separation of each service. Each one has its own CT. Think of that as me running dozens of Raspberry Pis, without the headache of managing all that hardware. On top of that, Docker gives me complete portability and recoverability. I can move services around quite easily, and can update/rollback with ease.
Finally, the combination of the two gives me a huge advantage over bare metal for rapid prototyping.
Let’s say there’s a new contender that competes with Immich. They offer the promise of a really cool feature no one else has thought of in a self-hosted personal photo library. I have Immich hosted on a CT, using Docker, and hiding behind Nginx Proxy Manager (also on a CT), accessible via photos.domain on my home network.
I can spin up a Proxmox CT from my custom Debian template, use my Ansible playbook to provision Docker and all the other bits, access it in Portainer and spin up the latest and greatest Immich competitor, all within mere minutes. Like, literally 10 minutes max.
I have a play with the competitor for a bit. If I don’t like it, I just delete the CT and move on. If I do, I can point my photos.domain hostname (via Nginx Proxy Manager) to the new service and start using it full-time. Importantly, I can still keep my original Immich CT in place - maybe shutdown, maybe not - just in case I discover something I don’t like about the new kid on the block.
That's a simplified example, but hopefully illustrates at least what I get out of using Proxmox the way I do.
The cons for me is the cost. Initial cost of hardware, and the cost of powering beefier kit like this. I'm about to invest in some decent centralised storage (been surviving with a couple li'l ARM-based NASes) to I can get true HA with my OPNsense firewall (and a few other services), so that's more cost again.
Incus is way easier to work with than Proxmox, and it sits on your OS of choice instead of being the OS you must use. For home use it’s way easier to use with the web ui, it even has clustering if you want to go hard.
So you can install Incus when you want a VM/LXC container and not have to commit to a VM/LXC container OS from the start.
Also Proxmox free just had a bad update that björked some stuff if you updated when it was live. Proxmox free is rolling and apparently lacks basic sanity checks for updates.
I used Proxmox for a couple years and it's good if you run a lot of VMs or LXCs, but I found that I'm not really the target audience. I ended up only running one Debian VM for my Docker containers. It was fine, but I eventually felt that Proxmox added no value for me, and the end result was sacrificing some memory and performance from using virtio emulations for CPU/GPU/RAM/filesystems. If your machines only have 8-16GB of RAM I don't think it would be a good idea, as I've seen the rule of thumb is to dedicate 2GB for Proxmox's usage, which is in addition to any guest OS's requirements. Meanwhile I have a Debian install on a VPS that takes about 450MB of RAM.
For me, pros:
Native ZFS support - invaluable, ZFS is terrific. MergerFS+SnapRAID is a decent replacement but the dodgy tooling and laundry list of footguns makes me nervous to use it on important data. ZFS is idiot-proof, as long as you know what you're doing during the initial setup. RAIDZ expansion is coming this year and you can still use mixed-size disks in a RAIDZ as long as you accept that all disks are equivalent to the smallest one, so I personally feel ZFS is acceptable for grab-bag disk usage now
Separation of bare metal and server environment, which means you can spin up another server VM from scratch without impacting the previous one, then switch with zero downtime. In the end, I replaced Proxmox with Debian on ZFS root (ZFSBootMenu) and wrote a few hundred lines of bash to automate the installation, so when I switched it only took about 30 minutes of downtime start to finish.
Isolation of different environments. If my VM gets hacked, it will have a harder time reaching my Proxmox host etc. I run all services in isolated Docker environments anyway so this isn't that big of a perk for my threat profile.
Cons:
Partitioning RAM for ZFS ARC, Proxmox, and VM leads to inherent inefficiencies at the margins.
I usually give my VM n-1 CPU cores, which is still less power than if I had just used the CPU natively.
GPU passthroughs to VM can be less efficient, depending on the GPU and how it handles it. My iGPU is less performant when using its ~SR-IOV feature
Learning requirement - not a huge learning curve but it's a lot of knowledge that I will not use now that I've stopped using Proxmox
Hosting your data pool on the Proxmox host or a dedicated data VM means that your server VM needs to use NFS to access its data, which lacks a handful of features (e.g. inotify) and is a pain
Need to maintain two systems for updates, downtimes, etc
More points of failure
Extra startup time
Run by a company that thinks it's okay to use winrar-style nag popups every time you load the console, and requires you to manually dig through the source to disable that. I understand it's their business model, it doesn't change how it affects me the end user who lacks $550/year to spend on disabling a popup
This is all over a GitHub stars badge? Developers probably want to encourage people to star it. It's a huge stretch to say they're trying to track people
I don't prefer proxmox, but I will say that when you have even a machine with 8 or 16gb RAM, virtualizing a workload on it just makes sense. At that point the cost is 12% resources, and the benefits IMHO farrr outweight that.
Proxmox is available free. You pay for support and maybe other things with a license, but you can download it and give it a spin at no cost. I just switched to Proxmox around 1m ago when I restarted my homelab project after years on hiatus. I used to use Esxi before Broadcom bought VMware and decided to suck. I like it so far.
It might be overkill for your needs. I'm running it because I want to play with setting up and managing Win Server (I only have experience managing existing servers on Win), so there's a distinct reason for me to be on Proxmox even though I'm a Mac and Linux person. I agree that it might be overkill for your i5 if you only plan to run one Ubuntu instance on it. However, a lot of homelabbing is about having an environment to try out and learn new skills. If that's something that's interesting to you, it might be worthwhile.
Keep in mind that you could also run KVM for virtualization if you find reason for VMs. You're not limited to Proxmox. And if you see no need for VMs, you already have three devices to do the things you bought them to do.
I've used Seafile for years just for this. I haven't ran that on pi, but on virtual machine it runs pretty smoothly and android client is pretty hassle free.
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