Proxmox Server
The home hypervisor everything else runs on: virtual machines, containers, storage and backups for the lab, on hardware that lives in this house.
CREATED SEP 1, 2025 · UPDATED JUL 20, 2026
PROBLEM
Every experiment that needed somewhere to run got its own cloud account, its own monthly line item, and its own way of being forgotten. The ones that mattered were exactly the ones that should not have been rented.
HYPOTHESIS
One hypervisor at home makes a new environment free at the margin — and free at the margin is what decides whether an idea gets tried.
ARCHITECTURE
Proxmox VE on bare metal. Containers for the long-lived services, full virtual machines where a kernel is needed, ZFS underneath for snapshots that make a bad upgrade a two-minute problem, and scheduled backups that have actually been restored from rather than merely configured.
STACK
RESULT
Running. It is the least glamorous project here and the one the most other things depend on.
LEARNINGS
- A backup nobody has restored from is a hypothesis, not a backup.
- The point of a homelab is not saving money; it is that spinning up an environment stops being a decision.