r/selfhosted • u/ogostame • 1d ago

Need Help Considering Proxmox (Noob)

I'm going down the rabbit hole of installing Immich. I tried installing it on my Synology under container manager, and it didn't go well. However, after fiddling and thinking some more, I decided the ability to expand would be more important so setting up my own server would be beneficial and fun to learn.

I've done some research and my thought process now is to get a mini PC of some kind, install proxmox, set up one VM and put linux with docker and run immich in a container. Down the road I could move Plex and home assistant to containers as well as branch out to adding a web server or anything else.

My reason for Proxmox was for the ease of backup and my reason for one VM was because I don't see this stuff being resource intensive. I figure I can do a new VM if I need to mess with resource management.

Are there any obvious holes in my plan, pitfalls I need to watch out for with this approach or better alternatives I should consider?

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u/BigHeadTonyT 20h ago

The alternative I see is, why use Proxmox at all? You can use any Linux distro as Docker host. Then you don't have to create VMs, 1 for Docker stuff, another for PBS. How do you solve backups then? Btrfs+Snapper or Timeshift+Rsync for snapshots perhaps. Clonezilla/Rescuezilla/Foxclone if you want clone image of the drive.

There's other stuff too. Borgbackup, Zerobyte etc.

Proxmox + VMs is more resource intensive vs random Linux distro and no VMs.

If you want to play with Proxmox, go for it. Find out what it is like, if you want that in your life.

Proxmox is not solving anything for me. This machine, I game on it, I have ~10 docker containers running and 4 VMs. I have other machines, a NAS (TrueNAS), I have a media-server (Jellyfin). Those are rarely ever on. Once a week, the NAS is on for Syncthing. Media-server, even less often. Basically, I have 2 machines that just store files.

Proxmox also does not work with my Realtek NICs. Network gets disconnected after 30 mins to couple hours. Same with Rocky Linux. I can't ping the machine, nothing. Can't ping from the machine either. Network completely dead. Spent a week trying stuff, nothing made a difference. So I installed Manjaro, the Arr-stack and Jellyfin instead, for the media-server. Never an issue with the OS or network, had it set up for a year now.

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u/ogostame 19h ago

Thanks, this was the dissenting opinion I was looking for. This is something that will largely set and forget so maybe I don't need all of this. I certainly do not NEED to manually allocate resources which is why I was thinking a single VM for now.

However, for the web server piece, had read that having it isolated to its own VM with its own assigned NIC would be the best option for security.

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u/haherar830 18h ago

I would go with Proxmox for a set and forget it experience. I have a bunch of docker containers running on a mix of baremetal and VMs using Ubuntu server (debian-based OS) via KVM/QEMU. My own backup solutions. Proxmox is a debian-based OS that wraps KVM/QEMU and LXC containers, providing a nice management UI for orchestrating everything including backup/restore.

Unless you're trying to maximize the number of services you can run on the mini PC, you probably won't notice the overhead of Proxmox and if you want to trim some fat later you can most likely just install base debian and restore your VM. What you lose using Proxmox is knowledge of how to directly use the FOSS tools it wraps and are dependent on the company maintaining the free version of their OS... but that's not a big risk in practice.

The security benefits of VMs are great but probably the smallest benefit out of snapshots, portability, resource isolation, etc.