Hi all. I was curious about some of the pros and cons of using Proxmox in a home lab set up. It seems like in most home lab setups it’s overkill. But I feel like there may be something I’m missing. Let’s say I run my home lab on two or three different SBCs. Main server is an x86 i5 machine with 16gigs memory and the others are arm devices with 8 gigs memory. Ample space on all. Wouldn’t Proxmox be overkill here and eat up more system resources than just running base Ubuntu, Debian or other server distro on them all and either running the services needed from binary or docker? Seems like the extra memory needed to run the Proxmox software and then the containers would just kill available memory or CPU availability. Am I wrong in thinking that Proxmox is better suited for when you have a machine with 32gigs or more of memory and some sort of base line powerful cpu?
It seemed nice at first, but one major issue: GPU passthrough was a nightmare. It cant be done in the UI and I didnt understand fully how it worked. There are many different tutorials not by promox that are outdated or may not work. It was frustrating enough I jumped to NixOS. Other hiccups included having to go to the terminal to passthrough drives for openmediavault, but that one was kind of straightforward atleast, and it worked first time.
In hindsight, I didnt actually need to virtualize everything at that level, so I never really had a good use case for it anyway. I use containers over entire VMs.
I think GPU passthrough has improved since you have used it. Some command line prep work is still necessary, but the passthrough config is done in the GUI.
I did it a week ago and it was just a case of passing through the video card. I came across a lot of guides and they were all in the CLI. I assume things have improved or maybe it differs per card. I was just using onboard graphics from an N100 CPU.
The onboard iGPU doesn’t need anything special once you turn on IOMMU. You just click add ePCI device.
A lot of guides are still for Proxmox 7 or even 6 on that matter.
Proxmox 8 has changed a lot in that regard.
It really depends on the hardware. Also PVE 8 adds some improvements. I would just follow the wiki.