Proxmox Articles in XDA Developer

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 01, 2026

• XDA ☛ Proxmox high availability sounds impressive until you try to maintain it

  On paper, high-availability sounds like a neat little trick for Proxmox users. Being able to access your LXCs and VMs even if the underlying host goes down is pretty handy, especially when you’re running a DNS server, firewall, and other mission-critical services on your nodes. Plus, Proxmox’s HA provisions can migrate your virtual guests to other nodes automatically without requiring any manual input whatsoever.

  If you’re rocking a production-heavy home lab or just want to tinker with automation projects, high-availability clusters are definitely worth checking out. Otherwise, the novelty wears off really quickly once you realize you have to buy extra hardware for clusters and commit a lot of time to maintaining your high-availability PVE environment

• XDA ☛ Proxmox helped me understand which operating systems I actually need

  Before using Proxmox to run my home lab, I always considered the operating system I used at the time reflected my technical ambition. By that, I mean dual-boot systems and other dedicated applications almost convinced me that each OS installed served a purpose. What I was unaware of was the accumulated complexity, which is something a virtualization platform such as Proxmox can help provide clarity on. I never stopped to ask myself, "Which OS do I actually need, and why?"

  Through months of experimentation, consolidation, and countless failures, Proxmox changed how I evaluate an operating system. Actually, it made me begin to do so, viewing an OS as a tool for specific workloads instead of considering identities. Unlike dedicated platforms, Proxmox encourages intentionality. I can create, destroy, backup, and migrate virtual machines and instances with a single button click. This eliminated the logistical cost of experimentation, which was a pain before Ventoy.

• XDA ☛ I was short on Proxmox nodes, so I used ZFS replication to save my home lab's uptime

  Unlike ESXi and its paywalled services, Proxmox lets me use every facility on the virtualization platform without forcing me to drop a fortune on a license. Take Proxmox’s clustering support, for example. Since I have some spare devices, I can group them together in a cluster and manage their virtual guests from a centralized interface. But the biggest advantage of clusters is the ability to deploy high-availability setups capable of migrating my virtual guests automatically if (or rather, when) my experiments bring one of the nodes down.

  Better yet, there are a couple of ways to create HA configurations on Proxmox. You've got the ever-popular Ceph distributed storage method, which is perfect for high-end home labs. Then there's ZFS replication that combines a simple process with minimal monetary investment – making it perfect when creating budget-friendly clusters.

• XDA ☛ Proxmox made me stop caring what OS my servers run

  Although I started my tinkering journey with a gaming PC housing Windows and Debian in dual-boot, virtual machines and containers have become an indispensable part of my toolkit in recent years. VirtualBox and VMware Workstation Pro (or rather Workstation Player, as it was the free product back in the day) helped me quite a bit, but their performance overhead on Windows 11 and limited functionality made it hard to rely on them for hardcore tinkering experiments.

• XDA ☛ I built a high-availability server cluster using Proxmox and two cheap laptops

  Enterprise high availability usually means buying expensive rack servers with redundant power supplies and IPMI management cards. The hardware alone costs thousands before you even think about software. But what if you could build a proper HA cluster using old laptops collecting dust in your closet? That is exactly what I set out to do, and not to boast, but I seem to have achieved that feat (to some extent, at least).

  I put together two aging laptops and ran Proxmox Virtual Environment to form a high-availability cluster that survives node failures and keeps virtual machines running. Mind you, this is not a toy homelab that crashes when you sneeze near it. This is a real HA architecture with quorum voting and automatic failovers. The laptops just happen to have built-in UPS systems in the form of batteries and integrated consoles that servers charge extra for.