r/Proxmox

I’m looking for recommendations for power-efficient (low idle power) servers for a small Proxmox + Ceph homelab cluster. Ideally something like Dell or HPE (rack!)

My main goal is to keep electricity usage as low as possible while still having enough performance for a few VMs and a Ceph setup (likely 3 nodes). Used/refurb hardware is totally fine.

Does anyone have experience with specific models that idle at low wattage or are known to be particularly efficient?

Hi All,

I'm hoping for some advice around proxmox and what do with a bunch of enterprise branch sites.

We have the following setup:

1 data center which we're currently migrating to AWS,

30 branch sites, each with 2 hosts with no shared storage currently running vmware standard, we use zerto to replicate VMs from one host to another. This means if one host breaks then we can spin the vms on the second host.

I'm hoping we can do something similar with proxmox if its possible? I'm still very new to proxmox but I'm thinking:

Branch sites with ZFS and a 3rd virtual host as a QDevice in our data center?

If that seems sensible, could anyone recommend any good docs or videos to set this up? I'm planning to do this in test first.

Thanks

Hi to all 😄 I intend this post as a discussion about how do you organise your hardware so it can help me make a decision.

• I use PCs basically for 3 functions:
• Homelab / Homeserver. This currently runs on Proxmox and I have several LXCs running there. I save my data here and it's also my Jellyfin server.
• Work. In Windows. Office suite and some coding. Sometimes, I a need GPU for doing image recognition or training AI prediction models. I use my gaming Gaming PC or laptop for this. Sometimes I need Linux too, I have a USB SSD for that.
• Gaming. I mostly play solo games. I'm not interested in multiplayer right now. I use Eden too for Switch games.

Currently, I have 2 PCs for this.

My old PC as a server with i5 10th gen, 64GB RAM, 1 TB NVME, 2 8TB HDDs and a GTX 1080.

PC Gaming with Ryzen 7500F, 32GB RAM, 2TB NVME, 1TB SSD, RTX 3080 Ti, PSU 1500W.

I would like to unify this all in Proxmox. I thought it could be a good idea since I can have one better PC rather than 2. But I'm not sure how Windows will work (with a monitor attached directly to the GPU) as a VM in Proxmox. What are your experiences with peripheral management? What are the disadvantages over my current setup using this approach?

Basically I would like to include an LLM at home and as I can only afford good GPUs in one system I'm exploring this so I have dual-GPUs (I'll buy another one and pair it with the RTX 3080 Ti) and my only option now is to have it on Windows which is not as convenient. Is it easy to automate turning VMs on and off with a USB remote or something like that?

When I need to code I would just use a Linux VM and connect via SSH with my laptop to this new server.

My idea is to sell my old PC except drives and buy a MoBo with dual x8 PCIe, a GPU and if I had enough money, sell the 7500F for a 9900X second hand. I'm a bit worried about the 32GB of RAM but I don't have many options unless I give up on PCIe 5.0 and I buy a 5900X.

Does anyone have experience with this or a similar setup? I would like to know your experiences

Good Afternoon Everyone,

I'll try and keep this short, as I can be a little verbose. Here is the short version:

1. I ran out of spinning disk storage on my PC and wanted to setup a NAS
2. I wanted to rip all my movies to a Plex Server
3. I don't want to spend a lot of money (lol i know)
4. I found everything I wanted (app wise) on TrueNAS scale.
5. I bartered some older HDs for baked goods.
6. Built the TrueNAS server on some old hardware.
7. I hit a wall when I tried to get ARM (automatic ripping machine) as the app built in to the store doesn't work anymore.
8. I spent some time on their discord server asking questions
9. They suggested just using an Ubuntu server and install ARM using docker.
10. I don't know linux...like at all. I have a Home Assistance box, but that was just follow these steps, and it just works.
11. I already have a lot of hardware running in my closet, and I don't have any other cases in the house that can hold that many HDs AND optical drives lol. So I don't want to just add another case/heat source in there.
12. I was mulling over the idea of just wiping the TrueNAS OS and just use Proxmox for everything. TrueNAS and plex and whatever I might need.

Do you all think this is a good way for a noob like me to go? Or should just buckle down and learn linux lol.

just wondering why the updates, are not being consolidated? as each kernel update needs a reboot?

Hey,

I was wondering how secure it is to connect to my home network via a Tailscale connection. I've enabled Tailscale on my Synology and configured it so I can access my home network through it.

That means when I'm connected to the VPN, I have access to Proxmox, Fritzbox, etc.

This happens fairly regularly (up to 2-3 times per week). I know about it pretty quickly because I can't go to any websites once my Pi-hole container has gone down.

Once Proxmox "freezes", I can't access it via the web UI and I have to power the server off and back on again to fix. This in itself has caused data corruption issues in the past so I really need to fix this issue.

I know the logs should tell me what I need to know, but I don't really know what to look for. Here is the last few lines of my logfile, presumably this is when Proxmox "froze"?

Jul 03 21:38:58 proxmox pvestatd[1418]: auth key pair too old, rotating..

Jul 04 00:32:06 proxmox pveproxy[635053]: got inotify poll request in wrong process - disabling inotify

Jul 04 21:39:00 proxmox pvestatd[1418]: auth key pair too old, rotating..

Goal
I want to install Proxmox VE on a node that has a single NVMe SSD and a single SATA SSD, so with no redundancy at all, while still using ZFS.
The problem is that during the installer, ZFS is only available when using RAID, and the trick of using RAID0 with a single disk no longer works: the installer throws an error saying at least two disks must be selected. Same thing for RAID1.
Context
My Proxmox cluster consists of two nodes:
• the first node is the one described above: a single NVMe SSD and a single SATA SSD, no redundancy;
• the second node has RAID1 for both the system disk and the data disk.
I need to enable replication (pvesr) between the two nodes, but the only way to do that is to also get the first node running on a ZFS filesystem.
Question
How can I pull off this kind of installation?

[resolved! More info in the comments]

Hello, I am a cybersecurity researcher, and I want to virtualize more than 20 to 30 VMs, including Linux, Windows, and others, to test my security scanners and simulate real environments. I would like to ask for hardware recommendations for this purpose.

After researching, I found that I need approximately more than 120 GB RAM and 40 CPUs. I also looked into Halo AI Max 395 devices, considering two of them, but I am worried about compatibility and troubleshooting issues. Do you have any ideas?

Hey Everyone,

I'm interested in the theory/results of something. I have a proxmox host - hosting an opnsense VM. I already have a dedicated box for opnsense, but I'm looking to move to virtualization (I know, it's probably a poor idea, but I wanted HA Proxy as its own VM and I didn't want it having to route through the switch... but my question isn't about the validity of virtualization... like I said, it's probably a poor idea).

However, while building out... I realized "Hey, I can do SR-IOV and pass-through a virtual function to each of my VLANs instead of just passing through the whole physical device and putting all my VLANs onto the same MLXEN1 port)."

What would the benefits be of this? I tried gemini, but it seems to be thinking that I want to do SR-IOV vs. VMBR (which is not what I'm asking - I'm asking about passing through virtual functions vs. the physical device).

Anyone have feedback on this? Is there any security, speed, or latency gain here (management is an obvious decrease)... wouldn't, in theory, this be avoiding the software layer in opnsense as well by tying it to a nic that it thinks is a physical nic (SR-IOV) vs. it having to route multiple vlans thorugh the same device (port 2 of the device)?

Or... because I'm putting the VLAN on top of it anyway, it's already hitting the software layer and there's essentially no benefit?

Hoping someone with more and better knowledge can either get added to this conversation or direct me.

​Hey everyone, I'm building a new home server. Proxmox installs perfectly on my older Samsung 870 EVO SATA SSD, but I'm getting constant kernel panics when trying to run it on a new Fanxiang S501 PCIe Gen 3 NVMe drive.

​What I've tried:

​Secure-wiped both drives via the Dell BIOS before installing.

​Disabled C-States and low-power settings in the BIOS.

​Tested a standard Ubuntu install on the NVMe (which works perfectly).

​The Issue:

The Proxmox installer finishes fine, but on the first reboot, it either freezes or throws inconsistent kernel panics/NVMe timeout errors.

​Is this a fundamental incompatibility between the Proxmox kernel and this specific budget NVMe controller, or is there a Dell BIOS trick I'm missing? Thanks!

I wanted to ask for some advice. I’m planning to build a new home server, but I’m not sure what the best approach would be.

What I need is:
Proxmox as the host OS,
4 HDDs in a ZFS RAID,
a small SSD (prefer sata) for the boot drive,
16 GB of RAM is more than enough.

I was thinking about using a ThinkCentre Tiny/Mini PC as the “brain” and connecting the 4 HDDs through an external enclosure. However, I’ve read that running ZFS over USB isn’t really recommended, and I’m not sure how reliable or performant it would be. The array mainly stores media, and at most it serves 1–2 simultaneous streams.
Do you have any recommendations on how you’d build something like this? I’d also like to keep using my existing ZFS pool if possible.

Its come to my attention that I probably should have some backup system set up for my home servers. A quick check with Gemini says that PBS has the ability to sync with any S3 cloud provider. I've never used any real cloud storage system aside from dropbox so I'm not sure how it works but I think this is what I want to do.

I want to backup specific LXCs and Data on drives rather than the entire system itself. I can live without a copy of my Plex server provided I still have links for the ISO's to redownlad them, but I can't live with my photo server being lost.

What cloud providers exist that are both cheap and offer some kind of privacy solution? I don't want my stuff to be scanned to train AI like Google drive is doing.

My Proxmox host (PVE 9.2, Gigabyte Z390 AORUS ELITE, i9-9900KF, BIOS F10, Seasonic 750W 80+ Gold) keeps freezing because the boot NVMe drops off the PCIe bus. Root fs goes read-only, host limps in RAM until I power-cycle. Caught the whole thing via an off-box kernel log streamer (journald dies with the disk, so on-box logs never show the cause):

nvme nvme0: controller is down; will reset: CSTS=0xffffffff, PCI_STATUS=0x10
nvme nvme0: Does your device have a faulty power saving mode enabled?
nvme nvme0: Try "nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=0 pcie_aspm=off pcie_port_pm=off" and report a bug
nvme nvme0: Disabling device after reset failure: -19
EXT4-fs (dm-1): I/O error while writing superblock
EXT4-fs (dm-1): Remounting filesystem read-only

Here's the kicker: those three kernel parameters were already active when it crashed. Verified in the captured cmdline and via get-feature 0x0c (APSTE: Disabled on the drive itself).

What I've eliminated over 5 incidents in 2 weeks:

• The drive. Happened on a Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB, so I swapped in a completely different drive (Samsung PM9A1 1TB, different controller gen, fresh PVE install). Dropped identically 6 days later.
• The slot/port. Happened in both M.2 slots (different PCH root ports, 00:1b.0 and 00:1d.0).
• APST / ASPM / PCIe port PM. All disabled (kernel cmdline + BIOS ASPM off). Still drops.
• Thermal. SMART lifetime counters: zero warning/critical composite temp time, zero throttle events, ~49°C at failure.
• Drive health. 0 media errors, 100% spare, error log literally empty after the event. The drive never sees its own death.
• Workload. Has died under sustained backup reads, under bursty docker writes, and now completely idle (19h of kernel silence before the drop).
• Kernel. Two different PVE kernels.
• RAM OC. Dropped to JEDEC 2133.
• PSU. Quality Seasonic 750W Gold with roughly 2x headroom over worst-case system draw (~425W with both GPUs and CPU maxed), full protection suite. And the latest drop happened at idle, not under load.
• No AER/DPC precursors in the latest event. The controller just reads all-ones out of nowhere. Only a cold power-cycle brings the drive back; warm reset/reboot doesn't.

Has anyone run into this and found an actual fix? Any idea I haven't tried is welcome.

So I've ended up with a corrupt kernel on my PVE host. I didn't even realise until I tried to install Tailscale as an LXC, and it turns out tun functionality is missing. As a workaround, I've got Tailscale running on a VM for now.

I had CoPilot walk me through trying to update it from the shell, but a matching kernel wasn't available. Something about these being custom Proxmox kernels with ZFS support. However, I'm seeing a kernel update to the right version listed in the updates within the UI.

I think the underlying problem was that 'local' had 100% filled. An external drive had failed to automount and a whole bunch of backups had written to the mount folder on the local drive instead and completely filled it. Having got to the bottom of that (dismounted the drive and emptied the underlying folder) I'm back down to <10% full on 'local' rather than the 99.5% I was at before. Possibly an update occurred without my knowledge and failed to complete due to lack of disk space?

My dilemma is:

1. Do I leave this well alone? It's working fine as long as I run Tailscale from the VM, so I don't really *need* to fix it.

or

2. Do I update it and fix the underlying problem so that I can revert to running Tailscale as an LXC?

Ultimately, I know the worst case scenario is that I'm reinstalling Proxmox from scratch and restoring all my backups. But that's a lot of work for very little reward.

Should I push the button on this anyway?

(Oh, and I'm really struggling to type 'kernel' with an E, having spent many hours writing 65xx code for the Commodore 64 back in the day.)

We have budget issues. If we spend 1000 bucks for a windows 2025 license can we repurpose the server on proxmox and VM the license to be a DC and a file server? It will have vtpm? In a few months, transfer license to new server?

Compliant for production environment?

Hp pro gen 8 v2