Homelab Setups

Proxmox VE Homelabs
1

What kind of setup are people using? My primary system is on two mini-PC nodes, a couple of macs, a couple of PIs, one ATOM edge as a squeezebox and a Home Assistant green.

The mini-PCs both have ProxMox with seven VMs, several of which run a slew of Podman containers. I moved away from Docker to establish a more secure rootless setup.

My PI4 runs Pi-Hole as a DNS and DHCP server, plus a qdevice to give proxmox a quorum.

My operations are built on Gitea and Ansible, running rootless with a robust set of workflows and playbooks to handle bootstrapping and maintenance. An nginx reverse proxy is the last pieced of infrastructure.

Is this similar to what other people are doing?

2

Three junked Dell micro PC’s from Ebay (loaded with 32GB memory and mirrored 500GB ssds) running proxmox and a bunch of container/vms running dockers, a 140TB beast that I built myself for storage running Truenas, a Synology DS920+ that gets powered on once a week for backups, and an elderly gaming pc with a 32 inch screen to manage it all. Four adguard-home setups synced with adguard-sync because who wants to be without DNS or with ADS? I had a few PI’s but sold them on Ebay because who want’s to rely on an sd-card? No ansible or playbooks or organised workflow. Just daily backups of /etc and /home/docker in case things go south.

3

I am currently looking at a couple of proxmox backup servers and integration with Backblaze to automate the backup chores. I like the idea of automatic encryption and de-duplication but am not ready to rely on that just yet.

4

I am running ProxMox backup server and I am very happy with. One great feature is that you can drill down and restore a single file or folder.

I implemented a backup hook script that rsyncs my ProxMox backup to a cloud server. I don’t like using cloud services, but backup is the one exception.

My backup hook also scans all my VMs and verifies that the firewall is turned on everywhere.

5

Thanks for the heads up on pbs. I will move it up my homelab chores priority list. All the (somewhat automated) backups are wasting my time. Here is my script for managing docker chores:

#!/bin/bash

cd /home/docker || exit
for dir in * ; do
cfname=“$dir”/docker-compose.yml
if test -f “$cfname” ; then
echo ======= Processing “$dir”
pushd “$dir” || exit
case “$1” in
stop) docker compose stop || exit;;
pull) docker compose pull || exit;;
start) docker compose up -d || exit;;
up) docker compose up -d || exit;;
logs) docker compose logs | tail -5;;
*) echo usage: “$0” “stop|start|logs|pull”; exit 6;;
esac
echo ======= Done with “$dir”
popd || exit
fi
done
echo ======== All operations are successful
exit 0

6

ProxMox backup is far superior to anything you can cook up on your own.

I’ve also installed Gitea, which is basically a lightweight Github. I take advantage of Gitea workflows, which can be setup to trigger and any push to specified files or folders.

Whenever I push a compose.yaml, the workflow automatically does the docker/podman compose down, up -d sequence.

The gitea workflow looks like this:

name: Unified Fleet Lab Deployment
on:
  push:
    paths:
      - 'stacks/**'
      - 'scripts/**'
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  deploy:
    strategy:
      fail-fast: false
      matrix:
        # 🛠️ STRIPPED & SIMPLIFIED: Added nginx-host directly to your flat execution array
        host_label: [podman-host, ansible-host, vault-host, closet-host, nginx-host]

    runs-on: ${{ matrix.host_label }}
    steps:
      - name: Checkout Source Code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          set-safe-directory: true

      # 🛠️ SHORTENED: Inline execution mapping that sends the loop target straight to your script
      - name: Execute Dynamic Discovery Deployment Engine
        run: ./scripts/deploy_discovered_containers.sh "${{ matrix.host_label }}"
7

9 Desktop PCs (4th gen i5 and up), written off by the company I work for. Loaded these up with as much RAM as possible (32 GB for most) and everything on SSDs. Did that a few years years ago. These form my Proxmox cluster, where 31 VMs and 19 LXC containers run. A separate Desktop PC acts as the backup server for the VMs and containers. In summer this setup runs on solar alone, in winter there is assistance of the grid. But I am saving up first for a home battery, before I invest in a faster network that allows for centralizing storage.

8

I built two Proxmox servers and in reading it is highly suggested to not build the Backup servers as a VM, however in a Proxmox doc somewhere they suggested if there aren’t any extra server hardware available to install PBS on the same server as PVE as a side by side installation. I tried that and PBS integrated perfectly with PVE and have been doing backups of my VM’s for over a year with no issues. I also sync the VM’s so each PVE/PBS server so each server has the local VM’s backed up and I sync the other servers local backups. That way each server has all the VM’s available if one server dies. I did create a separate zfs mirror for PBS.

9

Corporate clients that spend $thousands just for the ProxMox support licence probably don’t mind adding hardware for a backup machine, but in a homelab it is not cost effective.

The thing you need to remember is this: in a worst-case scenario (lightning strikes and burns up all your hardware) you need to replace the backup server before you can restore anything else.