Proxmox on The Home Lab

Getting Started with Home Assistant

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why Home Assistant?

Most smart home ecosystems (Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit) are cloud-dependent. Your lights, locks, and sensors phone home to a server. If the company shuts down, changes their API, or has an outage, your devices stop working.

Home Assistant is a local, open-source smart home platform. It runs on your network, integrates with over 3,000 services and devices, and keeps all automations local. Your automations run even when the internet is down.

Automated Backups with Proxmox Backup Server

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Problem with Ad-hoc Backups

Proxmox VE has built-in backup functionality — you can snapshot a VM to a directory or NFS share on a schedule. But it stores full backups each time, space grows fast, and restoring requires the whole archive. Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) solves all three problems.

PBS is a dedicated backup server that:

Stores backups with client-side deduplication and compression (typically 50–80% space savings)
Does incremental backups — only changed chunks are uploaded
Supports instant verification by recalculating checksums
Has pruning policies — keep 7 daily, 4 weekly, 12 monthly backups automatically

Architecture

PBS is a separate Debian-based appliance. It does not run inside Proxmox VE. You have a few options:

Docker vs LXC Containers in Proxmox: When to Use Each

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Confusion

New Proxmox users often ask: should I run Docker inside a VM, Docker inside an LXC container, or use Proxmox’s native LXC containers directly? The answer depends on what you’re running and what you value. This post breaks down the trade-offs.

What Is LXC?

LXC (Linux Containers) is an OS-level virtualisation technology. LXC containers share the host kernel but have their own filesystem, process tree, network stack, and user namespace. They boot like lightweight VMs — you run pct start 101 and get a full Linux environment in under a second.

Installing Proxmox VE

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What is Proxmox VE?

Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) is a free, open-source hypervisor built on Debian. It supports both KVM-based virtual machines and LXC containers, and comes with a decent web UI out of the box — no need to pay for a VMware licence.

Hardware

For this build I’m running Proxmox on two nodes:

Node	CPU	RAM	Storage
pve-01	Intel Core i5-12400	32 GB DDR4	500 GB NVMe (OS) + 2 TB SSD (VMs)
pve-02	Intel Core i5-10400	16 GB DDR4	256 GB NVMe (OS) + 1 TB SSD (VMs)

Downloading the ISO

Head to the Proxmox downloads page and grab the latest Proxmox VE ISO Installer. At the time of writing that was 8.x.