Proxmox turned my single server into a complete homelab

My self-hosting home lab setup has evolved into a pretty major part of my home, but it’s interesting to me to look back and realize how it all started and how quickly it evolved. I got into this whole idea last year when I had to set up Home Assistant for the very first time, but then this year, after seeing so many of my colleagues talk about what they can do with a NAS and what self-hosting can be used for, I wanted to level up my setup.

And that’s where Proxmox came into the picture. This virtualization playground has become the backbone of so many things in my home that I legitimately don’t want to think about the possibility of having to go back to a time when I didn’t have a home server. It turned a single, tiny computer into an incredibly useful tool for my family, and if you’re even remotely curious about home labbing, I highly recommend starting here.

Proxmox opened a lot of doors

Back in August 2024, I wrote about how you can set up a computer as a Home Assistant server. For that project, I had used a fanless mini PC review unit I had on hand. This worked alright for a while, and the PC being underpowered wasn’t much of an issue for something as small as Home Assistant, especially with the basic uses I had for my setup.

Eventually, though, I started to notice that the solid-state cooling solution used by my mini PC was louder than using a fan, making a very high-pitched sound that made it unbearable to sit in the same room. Since I was looking at using a much more powerful mini PC, it also seemed to make sense to make better use of that power, and that’s when I started looking into Proxmox.

I knew I’d be able to set up all kinds of services on Proxmox and turn my computer into a full-blown server. With just a mini PC, I could use Proxmox to host all kinds of containers, and if I added an HDD, I could even turn it into a NAS. After reading guides from my colleague Ayush Pande, I was set on setting up Proxmox.

I turned an old mini PC into my Home Assistant hub using Proxmox

I can now separate my services so that only my essentials run on this low-power machine.

What I do with Proxmox

Personal storage and so much more

My Proxmox setup is still fairly simple on the surface, but it does a few important things in my house. For starters, it has a virtual machine running Home Assistant. I know it can be run in a container as well, but the full Home Assistant operating system has extra capabilities. and by doing it this way, I was able to move my configuration from the bare metal PC to this VM without having to set everything up from scratch.

The other VM I have on Proxmox is TrueNAS, which I wanted to set up as a replacement for the cloud storage my family was using. TrueNAS runs off the SSD on my mini PC, much like Proxmox does, but in order to use it to store files, I needed a separate HDD. Thankfully, some mini PCs do have an HDD slot, and I have one of those, so that was easy to set up. TrueNAS is much more than a storage service, though, as I’ll explain in a bit.

The final service I have running directly on Proxmox is Jellyfin, which is running in a container so that it can use hardware decoding. I used to have Jellyfin inside TrueNAS, but this made it much harder to set up hardware acceleration, so I switched to this setup, which has been offering better performance and efficiency across the board. Using Jellyfin without hardware acceleration made the CPU work much harder and the fan was louder more frequently, so this change helped.

So many services

As much as I love Proxmox, TrueNAS itself is also a huge component of my home lab because of how many services I run on it. A lot of these services could be run on Proxmox directly, I admit, but TrueNAS does offer a very intuitive UI to set them all up, so that’s usually been my go-to for a lot of projects.

Rather than just throwing my files into folders in TrueNAS, I set up Nextcloud as a self-hosted cloud service where my family can have individual accounts and more easily organize and edit their files. I’ve also set up an OnlyOffice server so that I can edit my cloud files on the web, with no need for downloads.

While I use Nextcloud for documents and some work-related files, I also set up Immich specifically for photos and videos. The user-friendly interface and easy navigation make this the best way to host all my memories by far. Both my Nextcloud and Immich data are also backed up to the cloud, but using a "pay-as-you-go" Backblaze instance rather than a typical cloud, since it’s much cheaper.

Other services I use include an RSS reader with Miniflux, a media converter in ConvertX, a password manager in Vaultwarden, and even a retro game console with RetroAssembly. There’s so much you can do with TrueNAS, and even inside Proxmox, it all still works perfectly fine. I can access my passwords on any device, have an RSS reading list that syncs across devices, or play a game on my computer or phone, and it all works off of this tiny computer in my living room.

I simply don’t trust it as much

For a lot of these things, I could have set up these services in a Docker instance on Windows, but the reality is I simply didn’t want to for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, performance, particularly energy usage. I’ve noticed a clear tendency for Windows to be more resource-intensive, with PCs generally running louder and hotter on it compared to Linux. That would be even more true because in that case, you’re talking about a full Windows instance with a ton of services and things you don’t need, whereas Proxmox is a very lightweight solution designed precisely to run other containers. There’s far less in terms of UI and unnecessary services, which means my PC runs quiet the majority of the time, even when it’s on 24/7. Not to mention, a Windows PC would also need the Windows Subsystem for Linux to be running — another thing that would push the PC harder.

On top of that, Windows updates can be very frustrating, so if I was just running Windows 11 Home on this computer, I’d frequently be having to deal with updates being forced onto the computer, which can get old quickly if we’re talking about forced reboots every month. Not to say that I don’t update Proxmox, too, but I can do that on my own terms whenever I want to.

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A single computer can do so much

Learning how to get started with Proxmox and everything related to it was a challenge, and the same can be said for TrueNAS, but if you can invest some time, these two platforms show that a single computer, even a small one, can become a powerful server that helps your entire family in numerous ways.

Even though I personally rely on TrueNAS a lot, many of these services can be run directly in Proxmox, too, since they’re just Linux containers. I do it this way because these services don’t need super-fast performance anyway and it’s easier to set up, but you can go a long way with Proxmox alone.

How it started