[AgentMatrixAI]

Been using proxmox for a home lab and I still can't believe how much value they provide for free.

I use it with Cursor and create vm templates and clone them with a proxmox MCP server I've been adding features to and it's been incredibly satisfying to just prompt "create template from vm 552 and clone a full VM with it".

https://github.com/agentify-sh/cursor-proxmox-mcp

[kilroy123]

Yes, same here. Big shout-out to https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE as well.

[MomsAVoxell]

I use it for DevOps at work and it’s just wonderful. The data center features alone are worth the license fees .. but what I like most of all is how easy it makes managing ZFS pools.

[pphysch]

To be fair, Proxmox is essentially a UX wrapper around QEMU/KVM, which is free software and the true kernel of value. If you are going the MCP route I wonder if a direct QEMU or libvirt MCP server would be much more powerful and precise.

[tlamponi]

While UI/UX is–as probably everywhere–a huge topic, we actually have spent most engineering power in the whole management stack. And of that managing QEMU/KVM–while surely significant–is by far not the biggest part of our also 100% free and open source code bases. I'd invite you to try our full feature set, from clustering, to SDN to integrated Ceph management, to containers, backups including third party and our own backup server, and many more, all accessible through a REST API with full permission management and modern access control.

And we naturally try to contribute to every project we use however possible, be it in the form of patches, QA, detailed bug reports, ... and especially for QEMU et al. we're pretty content with our impact, at least compared to resources of other companies leveraging it, I think.

If all it'd take is being "just" a simple UI wrapper, it would make lots of things way easier for us :-)

[AgentMatrixAI]

While you could do that, proxmox offers lot of value with its UI which I need to default to time to time. With just an API key I generate from proxmox I have a wide range of capability that I can hook up an MCP server to.

The funny thing is with Cursor I can just generate a new capability, like the clone and template actions were created after asking Sonnet 4.

[Spivak]

Calling Proxmox a wrapper for KVM is hilarious, you're ignoring that Proxmox does all the work to make a functional cluster of VM servers including stuff like shared storage and live migrations and networking. If you only use Proxmox on a single server with local storage then I could see how you would say this but having a fleet of VMs on a cluster of servers where you can take down physical hosts to patch transparently is the "hard problem."

[SparkyMcUnicorn]

Proxmox has a UI and a bunch of APIs so I don't need to rebuild them myself, and maintains everything quite well (all major upgrades I've done have been pretty seamless). Proxmox is definitely an easy path, and you still have root access for drawing outside the lines.

[placardloop]

This is true for the act of launching VMs, but it’s pretty reductive towards the entire suite of important features that Proxmox provides like clustering, high availability, integration with various storage backends, backups, and more that qemu doesn’t.

[0xbadcafebee]

I mean, that's actually not being fair... It's like saying Windows is just a UX wrapper around a microkernel. There is quite a bit of functionality provided by that wrapper.

[_zoltan_]

it's not. their SDN built on frr and vxlan is itself a complex piece that has been missing from the free space (integrated as a package).

[trallnag]

What do you use all these VMs for in your homelab? I've dabbled with Proxmox in the past but settled on plain Ubuntu for my home server that I now treat as a pet managed with Ansible.

[SparkyMcUnicorn]

Take your pick. Everyone wants different things. This site/repo is pretty great.

https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts

[zamadatix]

For me Proxmox is mainly a means to be able to have more than 1 pet (partially for simplicity's sake of not having to make everything play well together in the same install, partially because I have some things which require Windows and some things which require Ubuntu).

I guess I do also sometimes use it for ephemeral things without having to worry about cleaning up after too. E.g. I can dork around with some project I saw on GitHub for an afternoon then hit "revert to snapshot" without having to worry about what that means for the permanent stuff running at the same time.

[npteljes]

I personally self-host a bunch of stuff for myself and my household. Nextcloud for my phone, mattermost for in-house communication, private wordpress as a multimedia diary, a bunch of experiments, wekan for organization, network storage, network printer.

I found Turnkey Linux pretty nice. They provide ready to use Linux images for different services. Proxmox integrates with them, so for example to install Nextcloud, all I needed to do is to click around a bunch on the Proxmox interface, and I'm good to go. They have around 80-90 images to choose from.

[nickthegreek]

immich, n8n, openwebui, metube, hoarder, gethomepage, freshrss, tailscale, reverse proxy, on and on it goes.

[AgentMatrixAI]

it gives me a direct bridge from cursor -> VM, for local dev & test out open source projects

I like having a local server I can carry with me and control using just Cursor to manage it.

So basically the freedom that comes with a homelab without using proxmox UI and ssh.