With its simple web UI, Proxmox is a great OS for newcomers just starting their journey into the home lab ecosystem. However, beneath the beginner-friendly interface lie a range of advanced features that can turn any old server PC into a robust experimentation and self-hosting war machine. So, here are five complex settings you can enable on your Proxmox machine to take your home lab projects to the next level.

5 ZFS pools

Bring the power of Zpools to your Proxmox machine

ZFS is one of the more prominent file systems used in modern NAS systems, and for good reason. Its self-healing provisions, copy-on-write functionality, and snapshot support make it a fairly robust file system for storage-intensive tasks. In addition to providing solid transfer speeds, it’s compatible with RAID technology, allowing you to put your spare drives to good use.

If you’re on Proxmox, there are a few ways to utilize ZFS pools. For example, you can set up a mirror drive for your Proxmox boot drive to provide some extra redundancy in case the main drive kicks the bucket out of nowhere. Alternatively, you can use a ZFS pool to run a bare-bones file-sharing server on top of Proxmox. Likewise, if you’ve set up a media server using Plex/Emby/Jellyfin on your Proxmox machine, you can set up different RAID levels for media drives.

4 VLANs

And check out SDN while you’re at it

Assigning Virtual LANs to containers and VMs may seem unnecessary for beginner setups, but it’s one of the best ways to reinforce the security of your Proxmox home lab. Smart home gadgets and IoT paraphernalia are extremely vulnerable to security threats. Whether you’re running a Home Assistant hub or a Zoneminder/MotionEye/Frigate surveillance system, it’s a good idea to isolate the containers and virtual machines associated with smart home devices inside segregated virtual networks with hardened firewall rules.

Then there’s the new SDN functionality implemented in the newer versions of Proxmox. Simply put, a Software-Defined Network provides virtual zones, DHCP IPAM, VNets, and other options to help you configure virtualized networks inside Proxmox. Besides providing useful hands-on experience with the networking aspect of Proxmox, creating an SDN can simplify VLAN configuration, especially if you’ve got an entire cluster of servers. Speaking of clustering…

3 High-availability clusters

With Ceph distributed storage

Learning by trial and error may be the core tenet of home labs, but unexpected downtimes can be a major bother once you start hosting essential services on Proxmox. If you've got a couple of extra PCs, you can set up a high-availability Proxmox cluster to keep your important apps running even if (or rather, when) your experiments become too much to handle for a node.

You can also configure Ceph shared storage for your entire Proxmox cluster. That way, the virtual machine and container data will still be accessible via other nodes should a server go offline.

2 Nested virtualization

Proxmox inside Proxmox, what more can you ask for?

If you wish to protect your home server against your experiments, setting up nested virtualization is hands-down the best method. True to its name, nested virtualization lets you enable CPU-level virtualization for your virtual guests – and this can open doors to some truly wacky projects.

For example, you can have entire virtual machines running inside Harvester, XCP-ng, TrueNAS, or Unraid VMs. Alternatively, you can provision a Proxmox virtual machine inside your main PVE server and unleash your intrusive thoughts on the foolproof experimentation server.

1 PCI passthrough

And GPU passthrough, for that matter

The ability to pass USB I/O devices to VMs is fairly useful, but the real fun begins when you start linking PCIe cards with the virtual guests on your Proxmox server. If you’re running NAS VMs inside Proxmox, you can leverage the PCI passthrough functionality to arm your (virtualized) storage server with NICs and HBA cards.

If you’re willing to get your hands dirty with configuration files and shell commands, you can even attach GPUs to virtual machines. As someone who’s previously set up GPU passthrough to play modern games inside a Proxmox virtual machine, I can confirm that using graphics cards inside VMs is a lot more plausible than it sounds.

Leveling up your Proxmox game with complex yet useful features

If you’re still not satisfied with this list, there are other ways you can enhance the functionality of your Proxmox server. For security-conscious users, the Firewall tab offers additional options to harden the traffic rules for your Proxmox server. Likewise, you can create users with different permissions and enable Two-Factor Authentication to further secure your Proxmox nodes. I also recommend installing Proxmox Backup Server on a separate PC if you want a dedicated solution for storing your Proxmox virtual guests.