Selfhosted

I moved to Proxmox a while back and it was a big upgrade for my setup.

I do not use VMs for most of my services. Instead, I run LXC containers. They are lighter and perfect for individual services. To set one up, you need to download a template for an operating system. You can do this right from the Proxmox web interface. Go to the storage that supports LXC templates and click the Download Templates button in the top right corner. Pick something like Debian or Ubuntu. Once the template is downloaded, you can create a new container using it.

The difference between VMs and LXC containers is important. A VM emulates an entire computer, including its own virtual hardware and kernel. This gives you full isolation and lets you run completely different operating systems such as Windows or BSD, but it comes with a heavier resource load. An LXC container just isolates a Linux environment while running on the host system’s kernel. This makes containers much faster and more efficient, but they can only run Linux. Each container can also have its own IP address and act like a separate machine on your network.

I tend to keep all my services in lxc containers, and I run one VM which I use for a jump box I can hop into if need be. It's a pain getting x11 working in a container, so the VM makes more sense.

Before you start creating containers, you will probably need to create a storage pool. I named mine AIDS because I am an edgelord, but you can use a sensible name like pool0 or data.

Make sure you check the Start at boot option for any container or VM you want to come online automatically after a reboot or power outage. If you forget this step, your services will stay offline until you manually start them.

Expanding your storage with an external SSD works well for smaller setups. Longer term, you may want to use a NAS with fast network access. That lets you store your drive images centrally and, if you ever run multiple Proxmox servers, configure hot standby so one server can take over if another fails.

I do not use hot standby myself. My approach is to keep files stored locally, then back them up to my NAS. The NAS in turn performs routine backups to an external drive. This gives me three copies of all my important files, which is a solid backup strategy.

It depends a bit on your needs. My proxmox setup is like multiple nodes (computers) with local (2 drives with ZFS mirrorig), they all use a truenas server as NFS host for data storage. For some things I use conaitners (LXC) but other thing I use VMs.

Install Proxmox with ZFS

Next configure the non enterprise repo or buy a subscription

I recommend you use containers instead of VMs when possible, as VMs have a huge overhead by comparison, but yes. Each service gets its own container, unless 2 services need to share data. My music container, for example, is host to both Gonic, slskd and Samba.

I use one VM per service. WAN facing services, of which I only have a couple, are on a separate DMZ subnet and are firewalled off from the LAN.

It's probably little overkill for a self hosted setup but I have enough server resources, experience, and paranoia to support it.

i have very few services and tend to lean into virtual machines instead of containers out of habit. i have proxmox running on an old mini-pc that needs to be replaced at some point. 16GB of RAM in it, 4 cores on the CPU (it's an i3 at 2ghz), and a 100GB SSD.

VMs and services are as follows:

• ubuntu vm
  • runs my omada controller in docker
  • used to run all of my containers in docker but i migrated them to podman
• fedora vm
  • runs several containers via podman
    • alexandrite, where i'm composing this now!
    • uptime kuma
    • redlib for browsing reddit
    • kanboard for organizing my contracting work
• dietpi in a vm to run pi-hole (migrated here when my pi zero-w cooked itself)
  • this also handles internal dns for each server so i don't have to type out IP addresses
• home assistant HAOS vm

home assistant backs itself up to my craptastic nas and the rest of the stuff doesn't really have any backups. i wouldn't be upset if they died, except for my kanboard instance. i can rebuild that from scratch if needed.

i'll be investing in a new mini-pc and some more disks soon, though.

For inspiration, here's my list of services:

Here is the overhead for everything. CPU is an i3 6100 and RAM is 2133MHz:

Quick note about my setup, some things threw a permissions hissy fit when in separate containers, so Media actually has Emby, Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr and two instances of qBittorrent. A few of my containers do have supplementary programs.

Replace cgit with Forgejo. I really like the software from Jason, but Forgejo is a huge difference

@modeh Id love to meet others who are just starting out with Proxmox and do some casual video calls/chats European tomezones to learn together /try stuff out.

I have a single container for docker that runs 95% of services, and a few other containers and VMs for things that aren't docker, or are windows/osx.

ext4 is the simple easy option, I tend to pick that on systems with lower amounts of RAM since ZFS does need some RAM for itself.

I do have an external USB HDD for backups to be stored on.

I would start with one VM running portainer and once that is up and running I would recommend learning how to backup and restore the VM. If you have enough disks I would look into ZFS RAID 1 for redundancy.
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/ZFS_on_Linux
Learning the redundancy and backup systems before having too many services active allows you to screw up and redo.

As with most things homelab related, there is no real "right" or "wrong" way, because its about learning and playing around with cool new stuff! If you want to learn about different file systems, architectures, and software, do some reading, spin up a test VM (or LXC, my preference), and go nuts!

That being said, my architecture is built up of general purpose LXCs (one for my Arr stack, one for my game servers, one for my web stuff, etc). Each LXC runs the related services in docker, which all connect to a central Portainer instance for management.

Some things are exceptions though, such as Open Media Vault and HomeAssistant, which seem to work better as standalone VMs.

The services I run are usually something that are useful for me, and that I want to keep off public clouds. Vaultwarden for passwords and passkeys, DoneTick for my todo-list, etc. If I have a gap in my digital toolkit, I always look for something that I can host myself to fill thay gap. But also a lot of stuff I want to learn about, such as the Grafana stack for observability at the moment.

You have that new machine to play with. So do it.

Install it and play around. If you do nothing that should "last forever" in these first days, you can tear it down and do it again in different ways.

I have recently played in the same way with the proxmox unattended install feature, and it was a lot fun. One text file and a bootable image on a stick.

@modeh Certainly no expert but would starting with setting up some cloudint image templates be somewhere in there?