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Hardware and Home-labbing: Proxmox, TrueNAS, and More NAS Modding
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XDA ☛ I picked Proxmox over TrueNAS Scale for my home lab, and I’d make the same choice today
They each have their strengths, but Proxmox is far better for my use case
When I decided to turn my old gaming rig into a home lab, I was looking to take the routes most traveled. I wanted a free OS that'd enable me to run services on a standard set of ATX hardware, and two names rose to the top: TrueNAS Scale and Proxmox. Both were free and had features that I had wanted. I tried TrueNAS Scale first, as the UI looked a bit friendlier, but it didn't last a day on my machine. It wasn't a bad OS, but its limitations led me to switch to Proxmox, and months later, I'd make the same call without hesitation.
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XDA ☛ TrueNAS 26 isn’t trying to be Proxmox, but it's getting awfully close for homelab users
For years, TrueNAS and Proxmox have been seen as two different tools for two different jobs. TrueNAS is the operating system you install when storage is the priority, with ZFS underneath and a feature set built for keeping data intact across drive failures, bitrot, and everything else that can go wrong with spinning drives. Proxmox, on the other hand, is the hypervisor of choice for running virtual machines and LXC containers, backed by a clustering and high availability story that's quietly been the backbone of countless homelabs. It's not uncommon to run TrueNAS inside of a Proxmox VM, so long as you do your drive passthroughs correctly.
But with TrueNAS 26, those lines are getting blurrier than they've ever been before. The latest beta from iXsystems brings LXC containers, high availability for those containers, GPU passthrough, and a web UI that keeps inching closer to the kind of dashboard you'd expect from a hypervisor-first platform. It's not a rebrand, and iXsystems would almost certainly never phrase it this way, but if you squint, TrueNAS 26 feels like a response to the homelab users who have been deploying Proxmox alongside their NAS for years.
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HowTo Geek ☛ How I run my entire homelab on Docker (and why you should too)
When it comes to homelabbing, there are a lot of services and apps you might want to run. While installing them individually is an option, I chose to go the Docker route instead—and there's no going back.
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XDA ☛ Stop treating Proxmox’s firewall like an optional feature — it's your lab's clearest safety net
For a long time, I treated Proxmox's built-in firewall like one of those features that sound responsible but feel optional. I knew it was there, I knew plenty of people used it, and I still left it off because my setup already seemed manageable. Most of my services sat behind my router, a few were tucked away behind other layers of access control, and I figured that was enough. In my head, turning on yet another firewall was just adding one more thing that could break without giving me much back.
What changed my mind wasn't some dramatic security scare or a major outage. It was the gradual realization that "probably fine" isn't the same thing as being intentional, especially in a home lab where services have a habit of multiplying. One container turns into five, one VM becomes a small stack, and before long, you're relying more on memory than policy. Once I finally enabled Proxmox's firewall and spent time with it, I realized I'd been underselling it badly. It's not just a box to tick for peace of mind, because it gives structure to a setup that can otherwise get messy fast.
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XDA ☛ Your old laptop is a decent entry-level Proxmox server – if you respect its limits
Building a self-hosting workstation out of old hardware is the best way to revitalize your aged computing companions, and I say that as someone who uses multiple outdated systems as Proxmox servers in my home lab. Although I typically opt for thin clients, cheap mini-PCs, and dinosaur gaming PCs when setting up experimentation rigs for my DIY projects, Proxmox is light enough to run on practically every x86 machine in my arsenal, including something as ancient as a cheap laptop from 2014!
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XDA ☛ Email alerts in Proxmox saved me from discovering backup failures weeks too late
Like many others, I've made Proxmox the heart of my home lab/NAS setup, and while I end up working in my TrueNAS VM more often than Proxmox itself, it's still important to make sure everything is backed up and working as intended. And whenever something is automated, it's easy to forget to check and make sure it's still working.
And really, you shouldn't have to. Proxmox can notify you whenever something doesn't work, so you can rest easy. The problem is, it doesn't do that by default, so I had to go in and do it myself. Here's how I did it, and you should too.
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XDA ☛ The best NAS distro dropped a public beta for its new update, and it feels more like Proxmox with each release
I’ve been rocking both TrueNAS and Proxmox in my home lab, with both platforms fulfilling their own roles. The former powers my local and remote Network-Attached Storage servers, houses most of my network shares, and runs services that tend to be on the data-hoarding side of the spectrum. Meanwhile, Proxmox Virtual Environment and its complementary first-party tools are responsible for hosting most of my FOSS tools, virtual machines, and other wacky virtual guests I use for typical home server projects.
That said, there has been a lot of overlap between the two platforms as of late, even though they’re technically designed for different workloads. TrueNAS, in particular, has begun adding new features centered around virtual guest management, with the public beta for version 26 cementing its position as a rock-solid home server platform – one that’s as good at deploying containers as it is at backing up files and hoarding TBs of data.
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XDA ☛ Don’t swap Docker for Proxmox's OCI support yet — the missing pieces matter more than the promise
Proxmox has always been one of those platforms that makes me want to tinker first and justify it later. When Proxmox VE 9.1 added native OCI image support, that itch got even worse. The pitch is immediately appealing because it sounds like the cleanest possible shortcut. Pull an OCI image, spin it up from the Proxmox interface, and skip some of the ceremony that usually comes with standing up containerized services.
That promise is real enough to be exciting, but it’s also exactly why I would argue that it probably isn’t ready for your home lab yet. This isn’t Docker magically living inside Proxmox with all the creature comforts people expect. It’s Proxmox taking OCI images and converting them into its own LXC-based model, and that distinction starts to matter the second you get past the first successful deployment. I like where this feature is headed, but right now it still feels more like a lab bench than a finished appliance.