Proxmox VE (Proxmox Virtual Environment) is a highly capable virtualization environment. Built on Debian Linux, Proxmox uses KVM for its hypervisor functionality, and builds loads of features on top of it all.

Many folks use Proxmox VE for their home lab setup (myself included!), and organizations are beginning to take a hard look at it as a result of Broadcom’s strong-arm approach to only selling VCF (VMware Cloud Foundation) to their customers (That is another post for another day).

A short list of important features that Proxmox VE provides is:

• Clustering / high availability
• CephFS for HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure)
• Live VM migrations
• LXC Containers

Proxmox VE is controlled via a web interface, but you can also do most if not all functions via the CLI as well.

In my own home lab, I used to run free ESXi. When Broadcom initially did away with that, I started looking for other solutions. I like open source, and I like Linux, so Proxmox VE was a perfect choice. Migration from ESXi to Proxmox VE was pretty easy. The later versions include a way to import VMware VMs very easily. There is still a conversion that it needs to do (from VMDK to QCOW2), so depending on how big your VMs are it can take some time to accomplish.

So what do I run on my Proxmox VE host? A few things:

• Proxmox Datacenter Manager (PDM)
• Jellyfin
• Nextcloud AIO
• Proxmox Mail Gateway
• Zoraxy
• Home Assistant
• ForgeJo
• Proxmox Backup Server
• MariaDB
• Zabbix
• Matomo
• phpIPAM
• A few websites

These are just a few of the things I tinker with in my home lab, powered by Proxmox VE. This is a highly capable hypervisor, providing great performance and enterprise grade features. You can run it for free, but licenses are relatively cheap when you compare them to other commercial hypervisors.

In later posts I’ll get deeper into the weeds on some of the features, how to use them, and possibly even provide tutorials on how to do various tasks.