Ask the home lab community about their platform of choice, and chances are you’ll see the name Proxmox show up multiple times. Having used it to build everything from practical home projects to downright unhinged ideas, I can attest to its prowess. But if you’re not fond of Proxmox, you’ll be glad to know that there are other virtualization platforms that can serve most (if not all) of your home lab needs.

5 OmniOS and SmartOS

Cool Illumos-based virtualization platforms

Illumos and, by extension, Solaris are the forgotten relics of the home lab landscape, which makes sense considering how efficient the other operating systems have become at running VMs and containers. Nevertheless, OmniOS and SmartOS are two free-to-use platforms that are worth trying out if you want to learn about zones and other Solaris features.

Both operating systems support KVM and bhyve hypervisors, which work well when you want to deploy full-fledged VMs. For lightweight operations, you can run containerized applications inside isolated zone environments. That said, they aren't as flexible as the other options on this list and have a steep learning curve when you’re a beginner. As such, you should be prepared to read a lot of documentation if you want to make full use of these platforms.

4 TrueNAS Scale

Or Unraid, if you love working with containers

So long as they aren’t lacking in the hardware front, Network-Attached Storage solutions can double as makeshift home lab setups, especially once you combine them with a powerful OS like TrueNAS Scale. Although iXsystems’ magnum opus is designed for NAS workloads first and foremost, its compatibility with KVM and support for containerized apps makes it quite the formidable platform for DIY lovers and tinkering enthusiasts.

That said, the recent altercations between iXsystems and the developers of TrueCharts resulted in the deprecation of the ultra-useful Helm Chart catalog. As such, if you prefer using containers over VMs, you might want to check out Unraid. Not only does it pair well with Docker containers, but you also get a huge library of apps and plugins for your home server-NAS amalgamation.

3 Hyper-V

Microsoft’s hypervisor is better than one might expect

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, many of Microsoft’s server tools are extensively used in the DevOps and sysadmin fields. This includes Hyper-V, a hypervisor that's compatible with Windows Server as well as many mainline versions of modern Windows systems.

While some advanced features, such as live migration, SR-IOV, and shared virtual hard disks, are restricted to the premium Windows Server, most of Hyper-V’s virtualization provisions are available on desktop versions of Windows. In fact, if you’re willing to ditch the Windows Sandbox feature, you can build a Hyper-V workstation on top of Windows 11 Home!

2 XCP-ng

The enterprise-tier solution

Despite the many arguments about the obsolescence of the Xen hypervisor (which I don’t agree with by any means), XCP-ng has its fair share of pros. Besides providing a solid interface that's great for users making the transition from ESXi (more on that later), XCP-ng is extremely stable and delivers solid performance when running virtual machines.

If you’re attempting to deploy multiple servers in your home, XCP-ng’s top-tier clustering provisions no doubt come in handy. While it does lack native containerization features, XCP-ng is perfect for production environments where you'd favor VMs over containers.

1 A Debian distro with LXC containers and KVM

I mean, that’s one way to define Proxmox

At its core, Proxmox is a Debian distribution that houses the KVM module and supports LXC containers, all wrapped inside an easy-to-navigate UI. Technically, you can load these packages on a pre-existing Linux distro (preferably one based on Debian) and turn the OS into a robust home server.

Heck, you can even set up Docker, Containerd, Podman, and other tools to turn your distro into an even more feature-packed platform than Proxmox. But the caveat here is that you’ll have to configure all the packages, scripts, and apps manually without the simple menu-based web UI of Proxmox.

Building a non-Proxmox home lab for your projects

By now, eagle-eyed readers may have already realized that I refrained from mentioning the enterprise-grade ESXi. Had I written this article a year ago, I would’ve granted it the second spot as the best Proxmox alternative. But Broadcom decided to channel its inner Adobe and, in what can be described as the most anti-consumer action of the year, discontinued the free version of the hypervisor.

That said, there are a couple of other tools worth highlighting. For example, Harvester is a useful platform that’s designed for professional virtualization workloads, though you’ll need at least 16 cores and 64GB RAM to run this behemoth of an OS. But if you’re unwilling to flash new operating systems, Type-2 hypervisors such as VirtualBox and VMware Workstation Pro/Fusion Pro provide a painless way to configure a home lab on top of your daily driver.