this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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Getting Started with Proxmox (piefed.social)
submitted 9 months ago by modeh@piefed.social to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hello everyone,

I finally managed to get my hands on a Beelink EQ 14 to upgrade from the RPi running DietPi that I have been using for many years to host my services.

I have always was interested in using Proxmox and today is the day. Only problem is I am not sure where to start. For example, do you guys spin up a VM for every service you intend to run? Do you set it up as ext4, btrfs, or zfs? Do you attach external HDD/SSD to expand your storage (beyond the 2 PCIe slots in the Beelink in this example).

I’ve only started reading up on Proxmox just today so I am by no means knowledgeable on the topic

I hope to hear how you guys setup yours and how you use it in terms of hosting all your services (nextcloud, vaultwarden, cgit, pihole, unbound, etc…) and your ”Dos and Don’ts“

Thank you 😊

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[–] catrass@lemmy.zip 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] modeh@piefed.social 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Thank you.

I guess I have more reading to do on Portainer and LXC. Using an RPi with DietPi, I didn’t have the need to learn any of this. Now is a good time as ever.

But generally speaking, how is a Linux container different (or worse) than a VM?

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 6 points 9 months ago

A VM is properly isolated and has it's own OS and kernel. This improves security at the cost of overhead.
If you are starved for hardware resources then running lxcs instead of vms could give you more bang for the buck.

[–] Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

An LXC is isolated, system-wise, by default (unprivileged) and has very low resource requirements.

  • Storage also expands when needed, i.e. you can say it can have 40GB but it'll only use as much as needed and nothing bad will happen if your allocated storage is higher than your actual storage.. Until the total usage approaches 100%. So there's some flexibility. With a VM the storage is definite.
  • Usually a Debian 12 container image takes up ~1.5GB.
  • LXCs are perfectly good for most use cases. VMs, for me, only come in when necessary, when the desired program has more needs like root privileges, in which case a VM is much safer than giving an LXC access to the Proxmox system. Or when the program is a full OS, in the case of Home Assistant.

Separating each service ensures that if something breaks, there are zero collateral casualties.