Ages ago, ESXi ruled over the home lab throne with an iron fist, but that time has long since passed. Following Broadcom’s takeover and subsequent removal of the virtualization platform’s free license, Proxmox has taken its place for many folks (including yours truly) – and even the reinstatement of the free tier has done little good for ESXi’s shattered reputation. As someone who has centered his entire home lab around Proxmox, I can confirm that the platform is every bit as impressive as you’ve heard.

That said, it’s far from the only option for tinkerers. Similar to the general-purpose PC and NAS ecosystems, you’ll find a ton of distributions that can handily power your home server. While I wouldn’t necessarily call it a Proxmox killer, Harvester is the closest I’ve come to a virtualization platform that can replace my PVE server should the company follow the same trajectory as VMware.

An uncluttered, minimalist interface

Harvester’s web UI is my favorite of the bunch

Before I begin, let me confirm that Proxmox’s web UI is far from the most convoluted out there in the server landscape. But once you compare it with the sleek and intuitive interface offered by Harvester, it’s hard not to love the latter. Rather than hiding all the essential features inside layers of menus, toggles, and options, Harvester includes all the essential home lab facilities in plain sight.

If you’re familiar with Type-2 hypervisors, you’ll have no trouble getting accustomed to Harvester’s interface, while Proxmox’s web UI requires you to go through a couple of documentation pages just to familiarize yourself with the basics. Heck, I daresay that Harvester’s interface is even more uncluttered than ESXi’s, making it the ideal option for newcomers as well as server maestros working on production-oriented systems.

PCI passthrough is a cakewalk

And so is leveraging GPUs in VMs

A few weeks ago, I used my Proxmox-based Windows 11 virtual machine as a daily driver, and while the experiment worked splendidly, passing the GPU was still a bit of a challenge. Sure, I managed to get it working on my first attempt, but that’s because I’d dabbled in PCI passthrough ages ago, and luckily, the procedure was exactly the same even on the latest version of Proxmox. If I were a complete beginner, Harvester has the easier (and more robust) implementation of PCI passthrough.

That’s because Harvester has a dedicated panel for passing PCIe devices to VMs, as opposed to the terminal-based commands I had to run on Proxmox. GPU passthrough was just as easy, at least for owners of Team Green's graphics cards. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by how easily I managed to access my old GTX 1080 inside a Harvester-powered Debian virtual machine when I first tinkered with this virtualization platform.

Flawless built-in monitoring provisions

The holy Grafana + Prometheus combo is unbeatable

I’d been using an instance of Uptime Kuma to monitor my Proxmox server for the longest time before making the switch to Beszel. While both are fairly useful for keeping an eye on my home lab, nothing beats the functionality of a properly configured monitoring server built using Grafana and Prometheus.

Although the Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts repository takes some pain out of deploying these containers, they’re still a bit difficult to configure, especially when you use as many nodes as I do. Meanwhile, Harvester includes native support for Prometheus and Grafana, and enabling them is as simple as toggling a few options inside the add-ons tab – a process that takes less time than you’d need to finish reading this sentence.

Rancher simplifies cluster management

But it’s only useful for production environments

Once you’ve deployed multiple nodes for your home environment, managing them can be a bit of a challenge. Proxmox technically has its own Datacenter Manager utility, though its functionality is pretty limited – with live migration and resource monitoring being its biggest draws. Harvester not only has a more robust clustering system, but it’s also natively supported by Rancher, a management platform built for Kubernetes setups.

Compared to Proxmox Datacenter Manager, Rancher includes tons of options to tackle your VM workloads, ranging from persistent storage setups to cron jobs and daemon sets. Besides the Harvester extension, it’s also compatible with Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE. But the reason I've mentioned this at the bottom of the article is that the average home labber (including my server-loving self) probably wouldn’t have multiple machines (if any) that fit the minimum requirements for a Harvester workstation. That brings us to the major reason why Harvester won’t overthrow Proxmox anytime soon…

Harvester requires extremely high-spec systems

I adore Proxmox for many reasons, and its fairly minimal system requirements is one of them. Proxmox recommends at least 2GB of memory and any ol’ 64-bit processor for a home server, though you can scrape by on a 1GB RAM system as well. And I say that as someone running multiple Proxmox nodes – ranging from old laptops and mere SBCs to decently powerful PCs and full-on server rigs.

In contrast, Harvester needs at least 32GB of memory alongside 8 CPU cores for a test environment, and twice as many resources for a production-tier setup. Even in my home lab, I’ve only got one system that meets this requirement – my dual-Xeon workstation – and two more that can technically serve as Harvester testing environments – the TerraMaster F4-424 Max and F8 SSD Plus – once I increase their memory capacity.

Throw in Proxmox’s built-in LXC provisions, community support, and compatibility with ZFS pools, and it’s easily the better option for most consumers. But if you’re rocking a powerful server rig and wish to move away from the Proxmox ecosystem to a more production-heavy environment, Harvester would easily be my top recommendation.