If you’ve been active in the home server ecosystem, you may have noticed the sheer number of operating systems available for your computing lab. For instance, the Rancher-based Harvester has grown into a fine platform for those who love tinkering, with regular updates further enhancing the functionality of this open-source OS. However, Proxmox is typically crowned as the emperor of virtualization platforms by the community… and that’s a notion I find hard to dispute. Having set up both platforms on my home lab, here are five reasons why I consider Proxmox better than its production-tier rival.

5 More customization options

Custom Proxmox themes, anyone?

As a virtualization platform built on Debian, Proxmox lets you outfit your virtualization environment with plenty of first and third-party packages. For instance, you can run scripts to add custom logos, boot screens, and even themes for your Proxmox UI.

Heck, you can even install the Samba package to turn your Proxmox workstation into a file-sharing server – without so much as touching a virtual machine or container! Although Harvester offers more leeway in modifying the UI to your liking, it can’t really match the customization features of Proxmox.

4 Native support for LXC containers

You don’t need a VM just to run containers

Although both Proxmox and Harvester require you to deploy a virtual machine before you can run Docker containers, the former’s support for LXC technology gives it the upper hand as far as containerization is concerned. On its own, Proxmox has several TurnKey templates for popular operating systems and services. You’re also free to add custom repositories to access more templates for your lightweight LXC containers.

Despite being built on Kubernetes, Harvester’s web UI doesn’t let you provision containers directly on the server. Instead, you’ll have to link your Harvester instance with Rancher’s management interface before enabling a beta feature to create and access containers directly on your server.

3 Built-in ZFS provisions

Great for NAS, even better for a home lab

ZFS is one of the most popular file systems for modern NAS devices, and for good reason. Its data protection measures like bit rot safeguards, snapshots, and copy-on-write functionality reduce the chances of your files and documents getting corrupted. Plus, it has terrific software RAID provisions, making it perfect for leveraging spare drives in your home server.

Since Proxmox has ZFS utilities built into its web UI, you can configure local volume managers on top of RAID-powered zpools. Due to Proxmox’s customizable nature, you can even add more packages to manage your ZFS volumes from the Shell interface.

2 Lower system requirements

And less performance overhead

Rather than forcing you to buy a behemoth of a server for your experiments, Proxmox can run smoothly on any machine with an x86 processor and 4GB of memory. As such, you can build a PVE home lab with inexpensive mini-PCs and old hardware. Even if you’re the proud owner of a powerful server, the low system requirements of Proxmox let you deploy a full-on cluster with inexpensive devices.

In contrast, Harvester requires a beefy PC to run your virtualization workloads. Considering that you’ll need an 8-core processor and 16GB of memory just for a test environment, you’d want to stay away from this openSUSE virtualization platform if you don’t have server-grade equipment or a powerful PC in your setup.

As if that’s not enough, Harvester has a higher processing overhead than Proxmox. Sure, it may not be noticeable when you’re building a normal workstation with a dual-Xeon processor and an overkill amount of memory, but you’ll feel the reduced performance on weaker systems.

1 Better community support

You won’t find this many DIY enthusiasts on Harvester

As the most popular home lab platform, Proxmox is blessed with a thriving community of tinkerers, DIY project builders, and server enthusiasts. From a multitude of guides, tutorials, and learning resources to dedicated forums for troubleshooting even the most complex errors, Proxmox is powered by a massive user base.

Not to mention, you’ve got the Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts Community Edition (previously maintained by genius developer tteck), which makes self-hosting containers a cakewalk. Although Rancher has created detailed documentation for Harvester, its learning resources and troubleshooting support can’t hold a candle to Proxmox’s community.

Nevertheless, Harvester has its own perks

So far, I’ve only gone over the areas where Proxmox triumphs over Harvester. However, the latter still has certain features that grant it a more even footing against Proxmox. Whereas PCI and GPU passthrough are a nightmare to set up on a PVE server, Harvester provides a straightforward method to pair your PCIe devices with virtual machines. Likewise, Harvester has a simpler and less convoluted web UI, on top of featuring built-in monitoring provisions thanks to Grafana and Prometheus integrations.

On the production front, it’s hard not to cheer for Harvester, as it includes practically all the features you’ll need from an enterprise-grade OS. But when it comes to casual home lab setups, I daresay Proxmox is the better option.