r/Proxmox

How is everyone handling PBS? Looking through the Proxmox documentation, they are saying it should be installed on baremetal. Is there any reason this cant/shouldn't be on a VM within my cluster? I don't have an extra server to spare for a dedicated PBS node. Is anyone using PBS on a VM within their cluster and what has their experience been so far?

I just spent a total of over two days getting our old virtualization platform (Blade center w/ 4 blades, only 16GB SD local storage on each blade, iSCSI storage) running for evals & tests, and still not completely done yet.

Admitted, I have very little hands-on experience setting up iSCSI, so some of the problems might stem from missing knowledge. But getting the systems to a point where at least basically I can operate the systems was such a pain.

I tried using some how-tos, but they seemed somewhat lacking. Then went the AI route w/ Claude, which did seem to work out to some degree - apart from the fact that literally any misstep I took during the manual Debian 13 install broke the Debian installer and forced me to start over (like in a Perma-Death game ...). On Wednesday alone I must have started over about a dozen times at least. When I finally got a system booting the first time, I was happy - until it stopped right after the initial boot. Again, start over, as some important part wasn't right.

At some point, I let Deepseek write something together for the setup, and this time I did get through pretty well, as it elaborated on some points in clearer description and more detailed. I then finally got the first Debian install running with boot directly from iSCSI, and all the way through to shell. Still had some minor things to change, but after that, gettting Proxmox installed on top was a breeze. I'm not all the way there yet, still have to get multipath configured & working for redundancy, but for now I'm just glad it's running. Managed to duplicate the system disk for the two other blades (wanted a 3-node cluster for testing) and adapted, with a separate shared drive for the VMs.

I know part of the setup is dependent of the underlying hardware, but I think if Proxmox brought out an install image that contains setup code for such an install, quite a few people might be really happy!

I'm an amateur, home lab, YouTube monkey, which is why this VM migration felt way too easy. The process of VM migration on Promox can't be this simple, can it? I wanted a simple way to share the data between two of my nodes, so I setup CIFS storage accessing my TrueNAS, I assigned the storage on both to be used for backup. I spun-down my Wiki.js VM then made a "stop" backup to the shared NAS storage. I was so happy to see a simple restore on the other proxmox node brought it back online. Well of course, duh, it's a fully contained VM. I'm just so tickled it's that easy. Thank you to those deserve credit 🥰 As for the rest of the Promox, I suspect it won't always be this straight forward...
PS. I've got a VM that's using a GPU in passthrough, it's running Ollama on Debian, what would be different about my story if I want to move a VM with PCI hardware attatched? Simply have similar HW (another AMD) and setup/tweak the pass-through settings after a restore?

I'm probably super late to the party, but Remote Desktop Manager (Devolutions) has a Proxmox dashboard.

I use RDM for SSH and RDP sessions for my homelab and was just reviewing the changelog for updates and noticed Proxmox mentioned. Come to find out they added support for this dashboard (and maybe other stuff?) over a year ago.

I just now connected it so it may not really be all that useful over the regular web GUI but thought it was cool so thought I'd share the info.

Link to info: Proxmox | RDM Integration | Devolutions

note: no affiliation with RDM/Devolutions, just a fan

https://preview.redd.it/l5jauott0suh1.png?width=1849&format=png&auto=webp&s=0340cfa5766819ee74584124625ebc233e97971d

We run a 6 node PVE 9.2.20 cluster with HA and two dedicated corosync links on separate NICs (Intel E810, link 0 and link 1 each on their own port, nothing else on those interfaces). Default config, so link_mode passive.
Today a single port started flapping on one node. The NIC counts mac_local_faults, the switch side shows zero CRC errors, physical link only went down once, but knet kept marking link 0 down and up every few seconds towards all peers.

[KNET ] link: host: 4 link: 0 is down
[KNET ] host: host: 4 (passive) best link: 1 (pri: 1)
[KNET ] rx: host: 4 link: 0 is up
[KNET ] host: host: 4 (passive) best link: 0 (pri: 1)
pve-ha-lrm: loop took too long (40 seconds)
pvescheduler: cfs-lock 'file-jobs_cfg' error: got lock request timeout
watchdog-mux: client watchdog expired - disable watchdog updates

Questions for people running larger HA clusters

1. Is anyone running link_mode: active in production?Does it actually make a single flapping link harmless?
2. Or do you stay on passive and raise knet_pong_count (or ping timeout/interval) to get some hysteresis?
3. Any other best practice to make sure one bad port or DAC can never cause a node to fence?

Root cause on the hardware side is being handled separately (DAC and switch). I am mainly interested in how to make corosync resilient against this in general.
Thanks!

Hi peeps.

Just finished my first script for Proxmox Backup server . I always had issues with Proxmox Backup Server and NFS. Too many issues with linux permissions, users on the synology server and so on. Then I saw this guy Derek who made a script to setup ISCSI LUN on a Proxmox Server host - I tried it out and it went fine.

Over time I have made so many reinstalls, finding scripts to assist me, run a setup and it just took time back and forth all the time, so I thought "why not made a nice script to try help others" . The script should be more intuitive, have menus, colors , be smarter , detect and so forth.

This is my first time trying to post in Reddit, so bare with me 😄 .

First I want to say a HUGE thanks to Derek who made the "backbone" of all of this. I just took the step further and made it smarter - a bit more "beautiful" to look at.

I got huge help from the Claude AI . Would really love to hear what people think of the script - any new ideas that I could add to it.

Hope that it can assist homelab users with Proxmox VE to make some great backups 🎉

Kr

MorphyDK

I’ve been thinking through how I want to organize services on Proxmox for my homelab, and I think I’ve settled on a hybrid approach. Please let me know if I am overlooking something.

Use a few VMs as major isolation/failure boundaries, then run multiple Docker containers inside each VM.

Example:

Proxmox
├── apps-01
│   ├── Homarr
│   ├── Linkwarden
│   ├── Mealie
│   └── Audiobookshelf
│
├── games-01
│   ├── Luanti
│   ├── Minecraft
│   └── other game servers
│
├── media-01
│   ├── Jellyfin
│   └── Immich
│
└── security/testing VMs as needed

My reasoning:

• A VM per application seems wasteful.
• Docker containers are lightweight and easy to group by purpose.
• VMs give stronger isolation than LXCs because each VM has its own kernel.
• If one VM gets overloaded, crashes, or has a bad configuration, it should be easier to contain the problem to that VM.
• CPU and RAM can be capped at the VM level to help prevent one workload from consuming the whole node.
• Related containers can all be backed up together with a Proxmox VM backup.
• Restoring the VM restores the OS, Docker installation, Compose files, local volumes, and configs together.
• Large persistent data can still live on TrueNAS and be protected separately with snapshots/backups.

So the basic philosophy is:

Containers separate applications.
VMs separate major functions and failure domains.

It seems like a good middle ground between running dozens of individual VMs/LXCs and putting the entire homelab inside one giant Docker VM.

I deployed the Proxmox Backup Server as a VM a while back. It has been working great. I noticed that the backup size is larger than the LXC or VMs. For instance, my OPNsense VM is 32GB, but in PBS, it shows as 34.36GB. My Jellyfin LXC is set to 10GB, but only taking 5.26GB according to the Proxmox Summary page. In PBS, the backups are 17.58 GB in size.

Does any one know why the backups are larger in size than the LXC or VM?

What can I do to optimize the backup?

My backup mode is snapshot and the compression is ZSTD.