modehGetting Started with Proxmox
catrassAs 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.
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?
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.
If you are starved for hardware resources then running lxcs instead of vms could give you more bang for the buck.
Lyra_LycanAn 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.
For inspiration, here’s my list of services:
Name ID No. Primary Use heart (Node) ProxMox guard (CT) 202 AdGuard Home management (CT) 203 NginX Proxy Manager smarthome (VM) 804 Home Assistant HEIMDALLR (CT) 205 Samba/Nextcloud authentication (VM) 806 BitWarden mail (VM) 807 Mailcow notes (CT) 208 CouchDB messaging (CT) 209 Prosody media (CT) 211 Emby music (CT) 212 Navidrome books (CT) 213 AudioBookShelf security (CT) 214 AgentDVR realms (CT) 216 Minecraft Server blog (CT) 217 Ghost ourtube (CT) 218 ytdl-sub YouTube Archive cloud (CT) 219 NextCloud remote (CT) 221 Rustdesk Server