Thanks to its cutting-edge virtualization features, Proxmox has one of the best platforms for home lab enthusiasts. Whether you’re looking for an easy way to build a Hackintosh or planning to deploy a battalion of containers, Proxmox has got you covered. For those without a dedicated NAS in their setups, you can turn your Proxmox host into a full-fledged storage server – and here are four reasons why you should do so.

4 No need to relegate an entire machine to a NAS OS

Proxmox is quite handy in budget

Like your average desktop OS, TrueNAS Core/Scale, OpenMediaVault, and other NAS-centric operating systems must be installed on a host machine. This means you can’t initialize them inside containers and will have to dedicate an entire machine to your NAS.

Sure, you can get them up and running on virtual machines via VirtualBox or VMware Workstation/Fusion Pro, but Type-2 hypervisors aren’t known for their performance. As such, Proxmox provides a solid compromise for those who don’t wish to buy additional hardware for a separate NAS.

3 Top-tier performance in virtualization tasks

After all, Proxmox is built for home labs

When you’re just starting out, you might only use your NAS for file sharing and backup purposes. But sooner or later, you’ll end up diving headfirst into the containerization rabbit hole.

Although dedicated NAS operating systems like TrueNAS Scale provide decent provisions for creating containers and VMs, Proxmox is on a different level as far as virtualization is concerned. Thanks to its robust performance, it can easily run several containers in tandem with your NAS virtual machine without breaking a sweat.

2 A central server for all your home lab projects

Including NAS, Hackintosh, home automation, and even a gaming machine

Proxmox is an all-rounder OS for home servers, and it can do a lot more than just NAS tasks. Assuming your hardware has enough memory and CPU cores and threads, you won’t have any issues when running multiple projects in addition to your NAS.

As someone who loves testing out virtual machines, I really appreciate how my dual-Xeon Proxmox server acts as a hub for all my projects. Plus, LXC containers are more optimized than you might think, and I often have at least one Proxmox container running Samba shares while I work on other home lab projects.

1 Multiple NAS configurations to choose from

With enough storage drives and NICs, you can even run these setups simultaneously!

There are plenty of ways you can go about building your storage server on Proxmox. A TrueNAS Scale or OMV-powered VM should suffice for most users, but the real fun begins when you start experimenting with containers, sharing protocols, and Linux distros.

Since Promox supports ZFS file systems, you can add all your storage drives to the platform and set up a container with SMB share privileges for a makeshift NAS. Alternatively, you can assign some storage to a Debian virtual machine before installing Nextcloud and Jellyfin on said VM for a complete NAS, private cloud, and media center experience!

That said, Proxmox isn’t a substitute for high-end NAS setups

Building a NAS inside Proxmox is a great starting point for familiarizing yourself with the virtualization platform. However, I’ll admit that it’s not a replacement for conventional NAS.

While you can close the gap in performance by allocating many cores to your NAS VMs and containers, there’s no denying that read/write speeds will be much faster on dedicated, bare metal storage servers compared to virtualized Proxmox environments. For intensive NAS tasks, you’ll need MD Raid and Ceph clusters configured on your Proxmox nodes, which can get rather complex when you’re just starting out. As such, if you're looking for an easy way to build a NAS or want the horsepower of a full-fledged Network-Attached Storage solution, you might want to build a dedicated storage server instead of going the Proxmox route.