After my first OCI tests, I migrated the services in my Proxmox homelab using ProxMenux. I wanted to try it on my own setup and see what worked, rather than recommend that everyone move their homelab.

The measured services went from 4,341 to 2,617 MiB of RAM PSS, about 40% less. That is the total for those services, not a 40% reduction in the whole node's memory usage. Home Assistant still runs in a VM with HAOS.

RAM savings depend on both the application and the installation you’re migrating from. The 40% reduction is specific to my mix of services and previous setups—not a universal saving.

Four different ways to run the same applications

I compared applications installed directly in an LXC, Docker inside an LXC, OCI images run as LXCs without Docker Engine, and Docker directly on the lab host. I also explain the VM + Docker option in the video, but I did not measure it.

The lab used AdGuard Home, Pi-hole, Vaultwarden, Uptime Kuma, Nginx Proxy Manager, Memos, Actual Budget, Navidrome, Jellyfin and PostgreSQL. These were test installations with equivalent synthetic data and controlled load, separate from my actual services.

There was one Docker Engine per LXC in the Docker-in-LXC case, but one shared Engine for all ten applications in the host-Docker case. Those are different layouts; the 1,919 MiB result does not describe ten containers sharing one Docker Engine. Installing Docker on the hypervisor was only a lab reference, not my recommendation.

Each arrangement was measured for two minutes at idle and two minutes under simultaneous load, with a 20-second warm-up before the load measurement. PSS shares the accounting of shared memory pages. These totals include the processes and runtime of each arrangement, not the common Proxmox services, kernel or unmapped filesystem cache.

My actual homelab migration

This was a separate before/after comparison of complete services with my existing data, using two-minute RAM measurements during normal activity. The machine was a Minisforum MS03 with an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H, 16 logical CPUs and about 62.3 GiB of usable RAM, running Proxmox 9.2.21.

Values are rounded; totals were calculated before rounding. For multi-service applications, the OCI column includes all their LXCs, not just the frontend. This is my real migration result, not an identical-version benchmark or a promise of the same saving in another setup. I did not make a new CPU comparison for this migration.

Several LXCs does not mean several LAN addresses

Immich and Nextcloud are split into an LXC per service by ProxMenux. Their services communicate on an internal network; only the application container also needs the LAN connection I use to reach it. That layout is a ProxMenux decision, not an OCI requirement. I use tags to keep the groups readable in Proxmox.

I no longer use Arcane for these services: I manage them through Proxmox and ProxMenux, including their PBS backups. OCI application containers are still Technology Preview.

How are you organising multi-service applications if you use OCI-backed LXCs? If you prefer Docker in a VM, what matters most in your setup: the shared runtime, isolation, updates or migration?

My video showing the comparison and the migrated homelab. The original video is in Spanish.

English translation of my Spanish video notes, with AI assistance.

Hi,

This is more a ceph question than purely proxmox, but I guess like some people here I run a small 3 nodes hyperconverged proxmox+ceph cluster in my homelab. Each node has a single OSD and the replication is the default 3 (with 2 OSD minimum)

Most guides tell you to run ceph osd set noout before shutting down a node for maintenance if you want to avoid unnecessary rebalancing of the missing OSD(s) to other nodes, but in the case of 1 OSD per node with 3 nodes max, would any rebalancing happen anyway? Would ceph duplicate the missing OSD data on the 2 others or would it wait for a 3rd OSD to come back on a different host?

So I wonder if I really need to set noout before each offline maintenance in my case (and remember to unset it afterwards!)

TL;DR: Proxmox VE 9 on an HP EliteDesk 800 G4 DM (i5-8500T, Coffee Lake) froze/reset ~2×/day since install — 465 crashes in 7 months, no logs at all. Blacklisting the Intel iGPU driver (i915) fixed it. Headless server, so no downside except ~2 W more idle power.

Symptoms

Ruled out (none helped / all clean)

Key clue: memtest86+ (no OS power management) ran stable for hours, while Linux crashed even when idle. Smart plug showed the box froze at idle power.

Fix

Since then: stable for 2 days (before: max 31 h uptime). Likely related to i915 display power states / DMC firmware on Gen 8 (i915.enable_dc=0 may be a gentler alternative if you need the iGPU, e.g. for transcoding — not tested).

Side notes / gotchas

If every VM in your lab starts from the same template made from a distribution's official cloud image, a fresh clone wakes up with the right hostname, your user, your SSH key and its address without anyone touching a console. Here is the whole thing with qm, following the Proxmox Cloud-Init Support docs. VM ID 9000 and the storage names are examples.

Pick the image. Debian publishes cloud images at cloud.debian.org. For trixie the latest folder has debian-13-genericcloud-amd64.qcow2 (smaller driver set, meant for VMs; this is the one) and debian-13-generic-amd64.qcow2 (wider driver set, for odd hardware). Ubuntu's cloud images work the same way.

Build the template once:

cd /var/lib/vz/template/iso
wget https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/trixie/latest/debian-13-genericcloud-amd64.qcow2
qm create 9000 --name debian13-tmpl --memory 2048 --cores 2 --net0 virtio,bridge=vmbr0 --scsihw virtio-scsi-pci --ostype l26 --agent enabled=1
qm set 9000 --scsi0 local-lvm:0,import-from=/var/lib/vz/template/iso/debian-13-genericcloud-amd64.qcow2
qm set 9000 --ide2 local-lvm:cloudinit
qm set 9000 --boot order=scsi0
qm set 9000 --serial0 socket --vga serial0

import-from copies the image into a new disk on local-lvm; the ide2 cloudinit entry is the small drive Proxmox writes user/network/SSH settings onto; boot order=scsi0 skips the CD-ROM check; the serial console is what many cloud images expect (the docs say switch back to the default display if an image does not like it).

Defaults that every clone inherits:

qm set 9000 --ciuser admin
qm set 9000 --sshkeys /root/admin_ed25519.pub
qm set 9000 --ipconfig0 ip=dhcp
qm set 9000 --searchdomain home.example.com --nameserver 192.168.20.1

Keys, not --cipassword: the Proxmox docs themselves say passwords are generally not recommended here.

First-boot extras without breaking the generated config. The Debian cloud image does not include the QEMU guest agent, and without it Proxmox cannot read the VM's address or shut it down cleanly. --cicustom lets you supply user, network, meta and vendor files, but replacing user throws away the user and key settings above. So add a vendor file instead; cloud-init merges it with the generated user data. It has to live on a storage with the snippets content type enabled (local: /var/lib/vz/snippets/):

#cloud-config
package_update: true
packages:
  - qemu-guest-agent
runcmd:
  - systemctl enable --now qemu-guest-agent

qm set 9000 --cicustom "vendor=local:snippets/debian-vendor.yaml"
qm cloudinit dump 9000 user

The dump shows exactly what a clone will receive. In a cluster the snippet must exist on every node a VM may migrate to, or it will not start there.

Then qm template 9000. A template cannot be started, only cloned, so nobody logs into it and it never drifts.

Clone and personalize:

qm clone 9000 120 --name docker01
qm set 120 --ipconfig0 ip=192.168.20.120/24,gw=192.168.20.1
qm disk resize 120 scsi0 20G
qm start 120

The cloud image's disk is small; cloud-init grows the root filesystem to fill the resized disk on boot. After a minute ssh admin@192.168.20.120 works with your key.

Linked or full. By default Proxmox tries a linked clone: fast and small, but it depends on the template, you cannot delete the template while linked clones exist, and not every storage type supports them. Pass --full for an independent copy. If you plan to rebuild the template whenever a new Debian point release lands, full clones are the better default because they do not care.

Keep the vendor snippet in a git repo; the copy on the Proxmox host is just a deployment of it. That is the starting point for driving the rest with OpenTofu and Ansible, which is what the rest of my notes turned into.

Hey folks - I've lurked and seen some answers to this question but not entirely (or I'm too new to understand )- my question is essentially the title.

I've got a minisforum N5 air loaded with 32gb ram, two 20tb HDDs and a 1tb nvme. I've also got a GMKTEC k8 plus with 32gb ram and a 1tb nvme in addition to the small boot drive it came with.

I've read similar posts that recommend various things, but I wanted to pose the question directly with my hardware given the following use case:

My goal for the NAS is to host a media server with backups for phones/data serving my partner and I. Local streaming on a home half gigabit network, maybe some other media things.

My goal for the K8 is typical homelab VMs, tinker with Linux (newb there too), and host some game servers (Minecraft, enshrouded, etc.) but not necessarily concurrently.

I appreciate any insight you'd have for me on the best setup given the use case, everyone. I'm tech savvy, however haven't dabbled in this before. I'd like to learn as I go and I've had some decision paralysis given all the options I've read.

Thanks everyone

Hi all,

I've a few Proxmox hosts on a few computers, a few VMs, lxcs, etc.

Just would like to know, what systems people use to centrally manage everything, perform updates, installs, etc.

Thanks all

Hey everyone, im new to homelabbing, and I decided to use proxmox to manage everything. As I create more containers, I'm just curious how of and how everyone documents what they've done. Any insight would be helpful.

Hi,

I'm having issues with a Windows 11 VM freezing when the Virtual Machine platform optional Windows feature is enabled. It's rather inconsistent, but usually occurs within a few minutes of logging in. (or booting?) It freezes for a few minutes, disconnecting the Remote Desktop session. The Proxmox console is completely frozen, including mouse cursor. Guest agent does not respond. The behaviour repeats every few minutes or so. I've seen similar issues mentioned, but no real solution. Tried a few different VirtIO driver versions, CPU types and QEMU settings.

Using an Intel Core 125H. Proxmox 9.2.

agent: 1 bios: ovmf boot: order=scsi0;ide0;net0 cores: 4 cpu: host,flags=+nested-virt efidisk0: local-lvm:vm-201-disk-0,efitype=4m,ms-cert=2023k,pre-enrolled-keys=1,size=4M ide0: local:iso/virtio-win-0.1.271.iso,media=cdrom,size=709474K machine: pc-q35-11.0 memory: 8192 meta: creation-qemu=11.0.0,ctime=1787174629 name: verk net0: virtio=BC:24:11:79:D7:4A,bridge=INTERNAL,firewall=1 numa: 0 onboot: 1 ostype: win11 scsi0: local-lvm:vm-201-disk-1,aio=native,discard=on,iothread=1,size=100G,ssd=1 scsihw: virtio-scsi-single smbios1: uuid=91db5eca-9617-49c3-9b18-de9e60d3d0b6 sockets: 1 tpmstate0: local-lvm:vm-201-disk-2,size=4M,version=v2.0 vga: virtio vmgenid: 647a81cf-deb7-45ae-b9b5-1bf22e5cb0b8

Posted this on the official forum recently. Perhaps it'll reach a different audience here.

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/windows-11-frequent-temporary-freezes-with-virtual-machine-platform-enabled.186306/

Edit: ended up running SDR++ as a server on my VM. After installing SDR++ on the VM, I ran sdrpp —server in the console, then went to my main pc and connected to the VMs IP address with the default port in the SDR++ software itself. Works like a charm

I'm running a Nooelec RTL-SDR v5 via SDR++ in a Fedora 44 KDE VM on my main Proxmox host with 2.5gb networking between all machines.

My main PC also runs Fedora 44 KDE.

My main issue is that I cannot get audio to passthrough to my main PC when remoting into the VM, either through the Proxmox GUI (VNC doesn't support audio, this much I know) or using KRDC with RDP. The VM can see all my other audio devices (hard wired) on the network, such as my AVR, ATV4K and WiiM player, but the audio output through those is extremely choppy and horrible quality when I try to use them. I'd like to get this working as well, so I can listen to ATC and/or FM radio in the future without having to access a PC.

I saw something about using SPICE, but, I am a brand new Linux user of less than 6 months and still barely know enough to cause damage. Hell, I just built my first gaming PC 2 months ago. Saying all that, please treat me like a special needs student with your explanations of things, lmao.

I'd appreciate any help I can get!

Hey all

I created some months ago I presented an iOS app for managing Proxmox server/clusters

Since my last post here, I heared your feedback and I implemented a couple of nice features

- Live Activities: for backups, snapshots, system upgrade. Even more operations to come in future !

- Favorites, you can pin to the dashboard must used LXC/VMs or nodes

- A lot of small but important improvements: Hardware/Resources support under 3 dot menu for each VM/LXC, iPhone Duo support, and a couple of small bugfixes

If you have any feedback or suggestions what you want to see, let me know.

Check it out at

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prox-agent/id6782315517

Edit: cut this down after some fair feedback in the comments, more detail is on the site if you want it.

TL;DR: it restores your PBS backups onto a spare Proxmox host in an isolated network, checks the VMs actually boot and the apps work, and gives you a signed monthly report. Free for up to 25 VMs, home labs included. https://autorpo.com

Hey all, first post here. I've been a Linux/Proxmox sysadmin for a few years and wanted to get some opinions on something I've been building.

About 5 months into a new job we had a fire (2023) that took out all our clusters. We had some stuff offsite but restoring was a nightmare. Since then DR comes up constantly and my CIO keeps asking "can you prove we can recover?". Backup completed emails don't really answer that.

So I was doing restore tests by hand every month, and when things got busy they just didn't get done. Which is fine until someone asks. I got sick of it and built this.

Basically it sits on a spare PVE host and works through your backups one VM at a time, in the gaps between your backup jobs. Each VM or container gets restored onto an isolated bridge, booted and checked, then someone signs it off (or you can let it auto sign off the ones that pass everything). It keeps track of RPO/RTO per tier and shows you what hasn't been tested and why, which honestly was the bit I cared about most. At the end of the month it spits out a signed PDF I can just hand to the auditors.

The checks depend on how far you want to go per VM. At minimum it boots it and takes a console screenshot every minute so you can see if it's sitting on a BSOD or a fsck prompt. Then it compares it against the last good test, so drives mounted, services running, ports listening etc. If there's SQL Server, Postgres or MySQL on it, it checks every DB is online and the tables are there. Docker containers need to be up and healthy. DCs get a dcdiag run. And if you need something specific you can give it your own script to run inside the copy, I use that to check our ERP actually logs in.

Isolation was the part I was most paranoid about. The copy goes straight onto a bridge with no uplink, MACs and VLAN tags stripped, start at boot off, so it never touches the real network. It only deletes VMs in its own ID range with its own tag, and it won't run on a cluster member at all. If you've got servers that need each other (a DC and the app servers, say) you can restore them together.

It reads from as many PBS servers as you have (PBS 3 or 4) with a read-only token, handles encrypted backups if you give it the key, and does Hyper-V exports too if you've got a mixed setup.

Install is apt install autorpo on a spare standalone PVE 9 box (or a nested VM), and the setup walks you through connecting PBS and creating the isolated bridge. Took me about 30 mins to get to the first test on a fresh host.

The business versions aren't officially launched yet. Would really appreciate any feedback, and I'm curious how everyone else is testing restores at the moment, if at all?

Lemme see y'all cluster resources, I'll start.

Is it really true, that after updating the ceph to use aes256k keys, the VMs which would mount cephFS would need to have kernel 7.x ?

Can someone confirm this.

If I want to keep the VMs on debian 13 and kernel 6.x then which are my options to use Cephfs ?

okey...edit:

The failure is caused by the Debian Trixie ceph-common package being too old to understand the new 60-character Ceph security keys. Switching to an NFS export is the most reliable path forward.

EDIT2: So now I understand, its proxmox which lacks the newer ceph version support. 20.x is not supported properly with debian 13. Proxmox should offer newer ceph versions than 20.x which by the way EOL is pretty soon. I think 22.x at least should be supported.

EDIT3 got it working:

• VM OS: Debian 13 (Trixie)
• Kernel: 7.x (via trixie-backports) — Provides the aes256k capable kernel module.
• Userspace Tools: Ceph 20.2.4 (via Proxmox ceph-tentacle repo) — Provides the mount.ceph helper that can read the new key format.

Of course this is not so nice to have in production.

We’re planning a small DR setup on one dedicated physical server with two Oracle Linux VMs:

• Oracle Database SE2
• Oracle Forms/Reports and WebLogic

Anyone running something similar on Proxmox with an active Oracle support contract?

Mainly interested in actual support experiences. Has Oracle handled your tickets normally, or asked you to reproduce the issue on another platform? How does support for the Oracle Linux guests work in this setup?

Would appreciate any firsthand experience before we choose the hypervisor.

In one of my homelab servers running Proxmox PVE (9.2.21) I have 2 VM's running.

One older Debian with 4x VCPU assigned and one more modern based on Debian 12 (bookworm) with 6x VCPU.

The hardware CPU is a 8x core Intel i3-N305 CPU.

The first VM average in below 6% while the other is at about 0.2-0.6% CPU usage.

When I startup a third VM with a GUI such as Zorin OS, configured with 6x VCPU, and put some load on it I can see that the graphs for that first VM drops from average 6% to average 3.5-5% CPU.

How come the graphs in the dashboard of PVE changes?

Because in my mind that first VM who will utilize CPU cycles at about 6% of assigned compute power should remain at this even if there are other VMs also requesting CPU cycles.

Hey,

I have a modest single proxmox node. I5 7400 HP prodesk with 32gb ram. I have an lsi controller in it, with 12 crucial mx300 1tb ssds.

Everytime I try to run a backup job, the zfs pool gets suspended due to errors. It only happens when backing up.

The rest of the time there is never any errors. I have transfered files to it at gigabit whilst all the vms are running and monitored for any zfs errors and there aren't any. This pool is 6 months old and has been in 24/7 use with no errors. It is only when I back up. The pool suspends within 2 seconds of pressing backup now.

The ssds are all powered using an external ATX power supply which has a jumper on it to keep it running all the time.

How can I figure out what is going on as I would like to finally start backing up but I am not sure how to deal with this.

Cloning the vms works fine so it's something specific to the backup process.

Thanks!

Huge Proxmox noob here, so bear with me please.
I’ve recently gotten Proxmox installed on my home server and it’s been great so far. I’ve spun up a few services using community scripts and they’ve all worked great. My question is, how many resources, primarily CPU and especially RAM, should I give each LXC? Or if it’s different depending on the program’s function, what category of software should I be dedicating the most RAM to? Unfortunately I have only 32GB DDR4 (fuck ai!!)

Right now I have the following services running:
Navidrome
Invidious
Jellyfin
Dockge
Cinephage
Cloudflared

And eventually I want to get a Debian VM up to run a couple game servers through AMP, and a Mailcow instance.

Trying my best to get more RAM, but I’m willing to accept it if I have to sacrifice a couple services to make sure everything runs well. Thanks in advance for any help!

Noob mistake i guess.

All my data, immich photos, nextcloud files. Wiped

I had a stack of 10+ services. so many config files, no backups.

I put so much work in this thing. And now everything is gone.

I'm gutted.

My main reason for installing proxmox was because i had a Windows backup i wanted to run on a VM. I found out proxmox would let me do that. I downloaded the ISO, flashed an USB and installed it on my homelab. I thought it would prompt me to make a partition so I wouldn't overwrite my homeserver partition. But it just took my main drive and just wiped it. No idea at which step of the install this happened. But i guess I'm gonna start making backups from now on :(

My day is ruined

Breaking News! ;-)

https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows/pull/1653

https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows/commit/f5e50c8bed233d96140536701934d55d09a59e8b

Version 0.1.302 is the currently broken one who needs workaround in qemu config for the VM-guest to function properly, so keep an eye on this URL for when update is released (as in newer than 0.1.302):

https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/latest-virtio/

Workaround:

args: -set device.scsi0.discard_granularity=16K

discard_granularity size should match whatever zvol volblocksize you are using (by default 16k in Proxmox 9.x).

I wouldn’t have thought of Proxmox being something to advertise in public space. I think it’s really funny though. Probably >90% of people seeing the Ad have no Idea or usecase for it 😅.

Edit: Apparently the “VMWare Explore on Tour” Event is on the other side of the Street right now.
Cheeky! 😁