What it is
Proxmox VE is a Debian-based type-1 hypervisor with a web UI on top. I run it on two physical machines clustered together — an old Optiplex and a beat-up laptop — and manage everything from a single browser tab. It hosts a mix of LXC containers (for everything that doesn't need its own kernel) and full VMs (for the few things that do).
Why I run it
I wanted something more serious than "Docker on a VPS" without paying for VMware. The killer feature is the unified web UI: one URL gives me console access, snapshots, backup scheduling, live migration, and resource graphs for every guest across both nodes. LXCs are the daily workhorse — they boot in under a second and feel like processes, not VMs — and when I need a real kernel (Home Assistant OS, for example), a full VM is one click away in the same UI.
How I use it
Every service in this catalog lives on one of the two nodes. The split is roughly:
- Optiplex — primary workloads I want stable and rarely rebooted. Vaultwarden, Home Assistant, the Docker edge container that holds my reverse proxy, the Tailscale gateway.
- Laptop — anything I/O-heavy or storage-heavy, because that node has a 1 TB NVMe data drive. Immich, Nextcloud, n8n, Proxmox Backup Server, plus media-tools and dev-tools Docker LXCs.
The cluster is small enough that I don't bother with HA failover; the value of clustering for me is the single pane of glass, not auto-recovery.