Building a quiet home lab with Proxmox
For a long time my "home lab" was a stack of old laptops that I was afraid to reboot. I finally rebuilt it around a single small machine running Proxmox, and the difference in how much I actually use it has been surprising.
Hardware
The goal was simple: quiet, low power, and enough RAM to run a handful of services without thinking about it. I ended up with a mini PC — a low-power x86 box with 32 GB of memory and two NVMe slots. It idles around eight watts, which matters when it runs all day.
Rule of thumb: buy more RAM than you think you need. CPU is almost never the bottleneck for this kind of workload.
Why Proxmox
I wanted both full virtual machines and lightweight containers under one management layer. Proxmox gives you ZFS, snapshots, a usable web UI, and LXC containers that start in well under a second.
Containers over VMs when possible
Most of my services are stateless and run perfectly well in LXC. The overhead difference is real:
$ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 412ms (userspace)
$ free -h
total used free
Mem: 1.9Gi 180Mi 1.6GiI keep full VMs only for things that want their own kernel — a firewall, and one Windows VM I use twice a year to update a device.
Backups
Snapshots are not backups. I run scheduled vzdump jobs to a separate disk and replicate the important datasets off-site. Twice a year I restore one at random, because a backup you have never restored is a guess.
What I'd do differently
I'd start with documentation from day one. Half the value of a home lab is being able to rebuild it, and that only works if the decisions are written down somewhere other than my head.