I will always recommend Proxmox, not just because it's really easy to add more stuff, but because it's really safe to tinker with. You take a snapshot, start messing around, and if you break something you just revert to the snapshot
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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This. Even if you were going to run a bare metal server it's almost always nicer to install Proxmox and just have a single VM
This is how I run my OPNsense router. Snapshots are great and rebooting is SO much faster!
Uh. OpnSense on bare metal can also do snapshots, if you set it up correctly.....
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
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!
I have recently moved non-vm truenas to a new hardware and actually it was a breeze. I just created the backup, disconnected the drives, physically put them into the new server, install the truenas, restored the backup, and it was done. I understand that everyone has different preferences. I'm just saying that it's easy to move truenas without it being the VM as well.
Not sure what youre doing with OMV that couldn't be done in proxmox, so feel free to elaborate there.
Almost all my servers are proxmox (some just Debian, though a few more specific work related solutions are lurking about). For docker I'd do an LXC, btw, I wouldn't bother with a full VM.
My (excessive) setup is all proxmox, set up as a high availability cluster. HA runs in a VM, and my USB devices are passed through (technically its USB over IP extension, so the USB devices for various VMs continually pass through even if I have to shut a server down).
Its where Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, homepage.dev, a bajillion stupid containers I mostly dont need, DNS, monitoring and analytics, mealie (recipe server), various websites I host, etc, etc all live. Nothing is by itself on a box except my workstations, but for non-linux use I have VMs I remote into (mostly industry specific software and random crap like an xp VM to use an old piece of hardware).
Can you quickly run me through how USB over IP is helping you out? I get it for devices that are physically distant, but how is the abstraction helping you for reboots? Isn't it just the server you're rebooting that talks to the USB device anyway?
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I use PVE professionally. I could spent some time bitching about how it handles ssh keys and the fragile corosync cluster management. I could complain about the sloppy release cycle and the way they move fast and break shit. Or all the janky shit they've slapped together in PBS. I could go on.
But I actually pay for a license for my homelab. And ya, it is THE thing at work now.
I've often heard it said that Proxmox isn't a great option. But its the best one.
If you do try it, don't bother asking questions here.
Go to the source. https://forum.proxmox.com/
Please elaborate. How does it handle ssh keys? And what is fragile regarding corosync?
SSH key management in PVE is handled in a set of secondary files, while the original debian files are replaced with symlinks. Well, that's still debian. And in some circumstances the symlinks get b0rked or replaced with the original SSH files, the keys get out of sync, and one machine in the cluster can't talk to another. The really irritating thing about this is that the tools meant to fix it (pvecm updatecerts) don't work. I've got an elaborate set of procedures to gather the certs from the hosts and fix the files when it breaks, but it sux bad enough that I've got two clusters I'm putting off fixing.
Corosync is the cluster. It's a shared file system that immediately replicates any changes to all members. That's essentially anything under /etc/pve/. Corosync is very sensitive. I believe they ask for 10ms lag or less between hosts, so it can't work over a WAN connection. Shit like VM restores or vmotion between hosts can flood it out. Looks fukin awful when it goes down. Your whole cluster goes kaput.
All corosync does is push around this set of config files, so a dedicated NIC is overkill, but in busy environments, you might wind up resorting to that. You can put cororsync on its own network, but you obviously need a network for that. And you can establish throttles on various types of host file transfer activities, but that's a balancing act that I've only gotten right in our colos where we only have 1gb networks. I have my systems provisioned on a dedicated corosync vlan and also use a secondary IP on a different physical interface, but corosync is too dumb to fall back to the secondary if the primary is still "up", regardless of whether its actually communicating, so I get calls on my day off about "the cluster is down!!!1" when people restore backups.
Thanks for your answer.
I use proxmox since version 2.1 in my home lab and since 2020 in production at work. We did not have issues with the ssh files yet. Also corosync is working fine although it shares its 10g network with ceph.
In all that time I was not aware of how the certs are handled, despite the fact I had two official proxmox trainings. Ouch.
Cool.
Here. SSH key issues. There was a huge forum war.
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/ssh-keys-in-a-proxmox-cluster-resolving-replication-host-key-verification-failed-errors.138102/
But its still a thing. That still needs to be fixed by a human. Today that's me.
Regarding CEPH and corosync on the same network ... well I'm just getting started with that now. I do have them on different vlans, but its the same 10gb set of nics. I'm hoping if it gets really lousy, my netadmin can prioritize the corosync vlan. I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.
EDIT ...
The linked forum post above leads to the SSH key answer, but its convoluted.
Here's what I put in my own wiki.
Get the right key from each server.
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
Make sure they match in here. Fix em if they don't.
/etc/pve/priv/authorized_keys
There's a couple symlinks to fix too, but this should get it.
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.
Why rule out proxmox as "complex" just because there is no need for HA??
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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
From an earlier post I made much like yours, I decided to go with incus. I'd be fully migrated if real life hadn't kicked me in the taint for a few weeks.
It’s great if you need what it offers. Otherwise, it’s simpler to set up something like Ubuntu Server.
I use Proxmox to run my email service, https://port87.com/, because I can have high-availability services that can move around the different Proxmox hosts. It’s great for production stuff.
I also use it to run my seedbox, because graphics in the browser through Proxmox is really easy.
For everything else (my Jellyfin, Nextcloud, etc), I have a server that runs Ubuntu Server and use a docker compose stack for each service.
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Don't use Proxmox, use incus. It's way easier to run and doesn't give a care about your storage.
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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.
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.
If you can replicate it, you should really file a bug report so that the next guy doesn't lose data.
It tells you it will happen when you use the restore backup feature.
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!
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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 shy away from VMs because I prefer having a pool of resources on a machine that can be used as needed instead of being pre-allocated. Pre-allocating CPU, RAM, and doing PCI passthough for GPUs wastes already limited resources and is extra effort. Yes, the best practice for production k8s is setting resource requests and limits, but it’s not something I want to bother with when I only have one server.
Just to address the resourcing point...
VM resources can be over allocated, meaning that the hypervisor will try it's best to meet their requirements, so you're not wasting anything and could run more VMs than you have resources for.
Yes, VMs can also be configured to need a certain amount of resources and the hypervisor will have to stop, but I just wanted you to know it's not fixed.
Proxmox is a convenient gui wrapper around libvirt but you can do everything without it.
but you can do everything without it.
yes but why would you? There's a reason we use GUIs, especially when new to a field (like virtualization).
yes but why would you?
Mainly because you're required to use their distribution, or to build on Debian, which is not to everyone's liking.
Of course that's an argument against proxmox, and not virt-manager and the like.
libvirt comes with some gui tool of its own, though I haven't used it. I generally prefer to understand what I'm doing, so I use command line tools or API's at first. GUI's are a convenience to use later, once it's clear how they work.
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It’s got more than just VM management, but yeah, it’s a frontend for a bunch of other services, that you don’t need Proxmox for.
This is untrue, proxmox is not a wrapper around libvirt. It has it's own API and it's own methods of running VM's.
Don't add a layer of abstraction until you need it, or you have the free time to learn it well enough that it won't cause you problems while you experiment.
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've been using Ganeti for like 15 years now, and I'm not sure what proxmox offers besides a nice GUI. I know how Ganeti works and getting up to speed on a new one doesn't seem super interesting to me. Is anyone here familiar with both?
Ganeti development is more or less dead. If you look at the github repo, it hasn't seen a notable release in 4 years. All that's been done is a small bugfix patch two months ago by the community.
The project being based on Haskell code also makes it less attractive for new devs.
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Proxmox adds a lot of complexity and a nice GUI. If you are fine with using the terminal, there is really not much benefit from Proxmox and the potential issues from the added complexity are IMHO not worth it. I am not a Proxmox expert though, so take this advise with a grain of salt 😅
Is it decently easy to create and manage vm's and containers with the terminal? I use proxmox at the moment. Should I switch to Ubuntu server?
Should I switch to Ubuntu server?
Thats a hard no IMO.
Even if you want to do something other than proxmox (just use Debian, fedora, or opensuse).
Its not bad from the CLI, you just need to know your commands.
virt-install --name=deb13-vm --vcpus=1 --memory=1024 --cdrom=/tmp/debian-13.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso --disk size=8 --os-variant=debian13
Will get you 1 vcpu, 1GB ram, and an 8GB drive worth of debian. If you don't specify a path, in home under .local/share/libvirt/images it will go!
You can also then
virsh edit deb13-vm
And you'll get the XML, where you can edit away.
Personally, I'd rather use the webgui for most things, but yeah its perfectly doable from the CLI.
I would have thought debian is better than ubuntu but I couldn't find a server version of debian. Where do I find debian server or debian cli only?
Debian is by default suited for server. Just skip the desktop environment part in the installer.
Oh ok, I've never installed debian before so thats good to know.
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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.
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