this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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What's the elevator pitch?
camera zooms in
whispering behind hand
“It’s debian with a webui”
you have my attention
What the other person said.
If you have enough resources to run everything as a vm and wanna use a webui that starts at “data center” and lets you drill your tree down from that then you’ll have a good time. You can get good at having big buckets of resources and allocating them to little VMs, or figuring out where the bottleneck is or whatever.
If you have a casio wristwatch that hosts your stuff the. It’s probably gonna be too much though.
That's pretty much the whole pitch. I think its bigger value might be in clustering multiple proxmox machines together and being able to load balance services across different host servers, but I haven't done anything with that.
The UI provides an easy interface for spinning up containers/VMs and doing networking shit. Otherwise it's just Debian. I was surprised how easily I got my old proxmox machine which hadn't been switched on since 2019 upgraded to a currently supported version. Was something like 5 consecutive full system upgrades and I didn't expect it to go smoothly but it did.
Basic use case: i want a NAS that will serve up a time machine volume
Is this overkill?
Perhaps. But if you have the resources (I'm running an n100 with 16g ram and it can handle a lot, thanks to Linux containers having very low overhead) then proxmox means you can easily add another function later. There are a few self-hosted services that suddenly stop seeming like too much hassle once you already have a virtualization platform with web UI. Maybe you decide you want a torrent client, or a home assistant installation, or next cloud etc etc
In terms of “could I do this with less?” yes it’s overkill.
In terms of “will I wish I had always been using this?” No, it’s not overkill.
I did everything all on one device, bare metal, a mixture of virtual environments and what not to make sure it all worked. It sucks when a torrent client taking a dump kills your nas.
When I switched to proxmox it was the perfect solution to all my problems built right on top of the system I already knew well.
Here comes a car metaphor: I have a boat. It’s about the tiniest boat that exists but just barely big enough with rigging to need a trailer. The trailer is so light even with the boat loaded that to change a tire I can just lift it up on to blocks.
Naturally I’ve towed it with a compact car. I even resisted towing it with a full size truck because who needs that? It’s so little!
But now I always tow with a truck. Safety alone from the wider side mirror placement and higher rear view is night and day. The actual real brake light hookup means the lights on the trailer reflect my actual indicators and now when I launch I have an easier time getting back up the wet muddy ramp to park. It’s also nice to have a whole bed to carry poles, coolers, etc.
If you can resist the temptation to just download and run bobs real good container then I’d go with proxmox or something like it.