Building a home lab can be a fun endeavor, regardless of whether you’re a casual gamer who wants to put their spare PC to good use or a hardcore tinkerer looking to experiment with cool projects. While there’s a lot of flexibility on the hardware front, Proxmox is the most recommended virtualization platform for owners of x86 machines. But if you’re still on the fence about putting together a home lab with Proxmox as its core, these five reasons will convince you to give it a shot.

5 A simple and intuitive UI

With plenty of utilities tucked away inside the neat interface

When I first heard about Proxmox, I was a bit apprehensive about the learning curve of the tool. After all, it’s quite difficult to get accustomed to a newer operating system, especially when said OS is designed for hardcore computing workloads. Thankfully, Proxmox has one of the most beginner-friendly UIs I’ve ever seen in a home server OS.

As someone who had to spend a few days learning the ins-and-outs of TrueNAS Scale, let me assure you that Proxmox is nowhere near as complicated as the other options out there. But you shouldn’t be deceived by the simple UI either, as it houses practically every tool, service, and facility you could ever want from a home lab OS!

4 Easy-to-deploy LXC containers

TurnKey templates further simplify the fine art of hosting your own services

Containers consume fewer resources than their virtual machine counterparts, making them better for self-hosting enthusiasts who want to keep the performance overhead to a minimum. Proxmox natively supports LXC containers, and you even get the option to download templates for your favorite services inside the web UI.

And there’s a huge number of TurnKey templates for you to choose from, including images for coding servers, web apps, surveillance systems, and even full-on Linux distros!

3 Robust performance in virtual machines

You've got KVM to thank for that

Of course, virtual machines are just as important when you’re building an experimentation server. Thankfully, Proxmox also excels when it comes to deploying and managing VMs. From different virtual BIOS to PCI passthrough and snapshots, Proxmox is armed with numerous facilities to help you fine-tune your virtual machine projects.

Since Proxmox uses KVM as the hypervisor, you won’t have to worry about performance or compatibility issues when testing your favorite OS inside a VM. Better yet, you can even set up nested virtualization inside Proxmox for some truly wacky hypervisor and containerization hijinks.

2 Massive community support

And it integrates well with popular home lab tools

One of the biggest perks of Proxmox is the huge community of tinkerers, home lab enthusiasts, and virtualization experts backing the platform. From troubleshooting guidance in Proxmox forums to the borderline unhinged projects designed by the sharpest minds in the DIY landscape, you’ve got tons of resources to begin your home lab on Proxmox.

That’s before you include the Proxmox VE-Helper Scripts (formerly called tteck’s VE-Helper Scripts) repository, which houses a treasure trove of one-step installation scripts to make self-hosting apps and services as painless as possible.

1 It's open-source and doesn't paywall essential home lab features

What more can you ask for?

Although Proxmox packs a plethora of useful facilities, you have limitless options to build your favorite home server projects using the free version of the platform. Of course, there is a paid version of Proxmox, but the only things you’re missing out on are the enterprise repository and 24/7 support from developers.

Meanwhile, Ceph storage, HA clusters, SDN tools, and other professional-grade features are available on the free edition of Proxmox without any limitations whatsoever. Contrast Proxmox’s free-to-use design with ESXi, Hyper-V, and other alternatives, and it’s undoubtedly the best virtualization platform for most home lab aficionados.

Once you’ve dipped your toes into Proxmox, there’s no turning back

Having used Proxmox for several months, I can attest to the tool's prowess. Sure, XCP-ng and Hyper-V are objectively better for production-tier environments involving multiple servers. But even then, Proxmox still has enough features to satisfy the needs of an average business. Be it Proxmox’s compatibility with the ZFS file system or the recently added support for Veeam backups, it’s an all-in-one platform that’s worth checking out if you’re even remotely into computing.