Armed with a ton of virtualization-centric tools, Proxmox is a solid platform for your home lab experiments. Be it wacky projects or highly pragmatic ideas, there’s a surprising amount of cool things you can pull off with the help of Proxmox. What’s more, you can even virtualize every aspect of your home lab using Proxmox, and here are four reasons why doing so is a great idea.

4 Proxmox can serve as a solid NAS

Even without using virtual machines or containers

Thanks to their backup and file-sharing provisions, Network-Attached Storage devices serve as solid additions to home lab setups. However, if your Proxmox rig has enough SATA and NVMe ports, you can connect your HDDs and SSDs to it and build a robust storage server on top of PVE… without installing a NAS OS on a virtual guest.

That’s because Proxmox supports different network protocols in addition to the ZFS file system, meaning you don’t have to invest in an extra NAS device to leverage RAID configurations, snapshots, and other advanced storage features. But if you’d rather use a dedicated NAS OS, you can just as easily install it inside a virtual machine on Proxmox and pass through your drives to the VM.

3 Easy to spin up virtual guests

You can deploy multiple VMs and containers in mere seconds

Be it creating several instances of the same OS or running your services in isolated containers, virtualization has multiple benefits for home lab enthusiasts. Proxmox further simplifies the process of setting up containers and VMs to the next level with its massive community support.

For example, the OS lets you download TurnKey LXC templates right from the UI, and you can use these pre-configured images to deploy containers without modifying long yml files. As if that’s not enough, you can find multiple repositories containing PVE shell scripts, with the all-popular Proxmox VE-Helper Scripts (previously maintained by tech wizard tteck) taking away most of the difficulty in virtualizing DIY projects.

2 Less device clutter to deal with

And more money saved on additional hardware

Old PCs serve as a solid entry point into the home lab ecosystem, and once you get addicted to building DIY projects, you may find yourself needing extra hardware to keep up with your tinkering needs. But aside from the upfront costs, setting up different devices for your home lab projects can result in a messy server.

But since you can run everything from NAS devices and firewall systems to full-blown desktop operating systems on your Proxmox machine, you can cut down on a lot of excess products that you’d otherwise need for your home server projects. The best part? If you’re up for the task, you can even pass GPUs to your PC and expect top-notch performance when gaming on a virtual machine inside Proxmox!

1 Nested virtualization is great for risky experiments

Nothing more foolproof than running a Proxmox VM within a Proxmox host

Home labs are meant to be sandboxes where you can test anything you want, as it’s easy to nuke your virtual environment and start over when things go wrong… or that’s the case until you design the ideal self-hosted server and become too scared to break it with your wild ideas.

That’s where nested virtualization comes in handy. Since you can deploy a Proxmox server within your PVE host using nested virtualization, you can tinker away to your heart’s content without worrying about rendering your precious home server unusable. Not to mention, this facility also allows you to virtualize other hypervisors on top of a single home lab.

A fully virtualized home lab has some cons, too

That said, there are some caveats to running all your home lab operations on a single device. If you’re not running Proxmox inside a high-availability setup, having a single point of failure could prove catastrophic if you’re hosting important services on your workstation. Not to mention, you may end up with scalability issues if your rig can’t handle all the virtual machines needed for your complex workloads. But if you’re still planning to build a fully virtualized home server, Proxmox is easily the best hypervisor on the block.