I recently rebuilt my home server from scratch, and after a bunch of research decided to run Proxmox [1] on it. I considered Kubernetes but two things really h

I recently rebuilt my home server from scratch, and after a bunch of research decided to run Proxmox [1] on it. I considered Kubernetes but two things really held me back: I've never installed/managed Kubernetes itself (and didn't really want to learn with my "production" home network), and I wanted to be able to run things other than Docker containers such as a Windows VM. I've used stuff like VMware and VirtualBox before and Proxmox is closer to those, but without the overhead of everything being a full VM. My old system was a "The Server" style setup as described here, running everything on a single Ubuntu bare metal machine (acting as a NAS, running Plex, Unifi, HomeAssistant, and a dozen other applications). It was getting old, had gone through some major OS upgrades and was about due for another. I used to do more "experimental" work on other old hardware I had laying around, but there's so much overhead involved that it often killed my motivation to learn something new. It's only been a couple months but I'm quite happy with Proxmox so far. I run most stuff in LXC containers with Alpine, though have at least one Ubuntu (Unifi Controller) and have played with some VMs (qemu): Hass-io [2] (which is designed for the Pi) and Windows 10 (just to try it). I actually made my Windows 10 image into a template, so I can quickly stand up an instance to try something out on Windows without hassle of reinstalling or worrying about breaking an actual PC. The LXC containers are very lightweight, and what I love is I can upgrade, experiment or swap out a service knowing I have good isolation from everything else -- just restore backup or revert to a snapshot. If I need to run the latest Debian Unstable to try some particular application out, I can do that without worry or having to setup another machine. Even porting everything over was very smooth, since I didn't have to worry about interaction between things or worry too much about permissions -- just install where it wants to go, whatever. (I used to try to keep my server setup in a consistent way, and it was often painful when some app had a different way of running or configuring itself or expected a different filesystem or user+group layout than I wanted). Now I just make symlinks in /root of each container and/or use Proxmox's "notes" feature to remind my future self where config files or other important things are located, and that's worked fine so far. What I can't attest to is what's involved in running it long-term: for example I haven't had to upgrade Proxmox itself, yet. On the plus side, it's removed an excuse preventing me from learning new things, and I donated/recycled a big pile of old hardware I had sitting in the basement ("just in case" I wanted to experiment on something). [1] https://www.proxmox.com/ https://www.proxmox.com/ [2] https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/ https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/