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?
As a small homelabber I agree with this. I started with a baremetal and using Docker, and switched to Proxmox, and now over to Incus, actually currently I am using Debian with cockpit + cockpit-machines. I do like Incus, I keep hopping back and forth between cockpit, I need to settle on one.
Actually it would be interesting to see cockpit-machines move to Incus as a virtualization backend and support both LXC containers and QEMU VMs tat way.