Proxmox VE is a Type 1 hypervisor that runs on bare metal and lets you manage VMs and LXC containers from a web UI. It's free, open source, and surprisingly good for home lab use.
Why Proxmox
I had an old desktop sitting unused. Instead of running services directly on the OS, I wanted isolation between them — so a misconfigured container can't take down everything else. Proxmox gives you that without the cost of ESXi or the complexity of a full Kubernetes setup.
The setup
Hardware: old desktop with 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD. Proxmox installs directly onto the machine as the OS — there's no host OS underneath.
I run three things on it:
- Tailscale on every VM/container — lets me reach everything over a private WireGuard mesh without opening ports on my router
- Docker inside an LXC container for most services — keeps things portable and avoids VM overhead
- A dedicated VM for anything that needs a real kernel (like running my Node.js backend services)
Networking
The part that took the most trial and error. I use a Linux bridge (vmbr0) so containers get their own IPs on the local network. Tailscale handles access from outside the house — no port forwarding, no dynamic DNS.
What I'd tell past me
Start with LXC containers, not VMs. They boot in seconds, use less RAM, and are fine for 95% of workloads. Save VMs for things that actually need kernel-level isolation.