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Recent Proxmox Coverage at Valnet
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XDA ☛ Proxmox is overkill for your first server, and that's exactly why you should learn it
Whether you’re planning to put together a server from enterprise-tier equipment or just want to reuse an old PC that’s been gathering dust, you’ll need to arm your tinkering node with an operating system. For folks who’ve been in the home lab ecosystem, you’ll probably go with a powerful virtualization platform like Proxmox without batting an eye. But when you’re a newcomer to home servers and only have limited experience outside of Windows, Proxmox may seem somewhat convoluted for your needs.
Truth be told, it probably is overkill for your project-building needs, especially considering that you can deploy VMs and containers on Windows and GUI-heavy Linux distributions. But if you’re even remotely into servers, you’ll want to get familiar with Proxmox, as its complexity and production-grade features are precisely what make it the ideal learning platform.
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XDA ☛ Proxmox's best feature isn't virtualization; it's the backup system
Proxmox is one of the most frequent names you'll likely come across for running a virtualized self-hosted home lab. It has everything required to get up and running in no time, including high availability, clustering, Linux container (LXC) support, and full KVM. It's also open-source and available for free, though optional subscriptions are available should you require them. We've been using Proxmox here at XDA for years now with great success, but interestingly, I find the best part about Proxmox isn't the virtualization itself, but the available backup system.
Backups are vital for any operation. This could be something simple, like your smartphone or an entire home-based data center. This handy strategy of making copies of your successfully running systems allows one to return from disaster with the click of a button or CLI command. The best part of Proxmox and backups is that it's all integrated into the system without requiring third-party tools. Configuring backups within Proxmox can be achieved seamlessly while setting up virtual instances to run just about everything you could imagine.
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XDA ☛ 4 Windows tools I replaced with a single Linux VM
Over the last few years, my Windows install has slowly accumulated a collection of tools, most of which don't really need to live on my main workstation. A scheduled task here, a network scanner there, an SSH client I swore I’d uninstall later, and half a dozen small utilities that only existed because Windows wasn’t great at that specific job. None of them were particularly heavy applications on their own, but I was growing a bit tired of the clutter. I decided it was time to put my Proxmox box to good use, and create a Linux VM that I could use for these utilities. The result was a cleaner workstation, and tools that work better for my use case.