That is a strange opening for a "why Proxmox" post in 2026. Most of these read as migration stories: Broadcom killed our renewal, here is what we did. I did not migrate. I evaluated, picked Proxmox in 2024, and never went back to look. Two years in, I would make the same call.
The reasons it was an easy call:
LXC and KVM in one host
Most workloads in this homelab are LXCs. Pi-hole, Vaultwarden, Authelia, Traefik, the monitoring stack, GitLab itself. A few things run as full VMs: the NAS guest, Proxmox Backup Server, the Home Assistant OS appliance. The same hypervisor, the same CLI, and the same web UI cover both shapes of workload.
The alternative is ESXi for the VMs plus a separate toolchain for the containers. That is two backup pipelines, two HA stories, and two more places for config drift to surprise you at 2 AM.
$ pct exec 254 systemctl status authelia
$ qm start 189
These are the same shape. New hires do not need to learn one tool for containers and a different one for VMs.
Proxmox Backup Server beats the free Veeam alternative
Chunk-level deduplication. Backups across guests and across time share storage. A nightly backup of every guest runs in about ten minutes and adds a few hundred megabytes of new chunks, because most of the content is the same as yesterday.
Cluster-scheduled. One job definition runs across every node. No per-node cron, no manual rotation when a node moves.
Restore to a different storage class. A backup taken from local-lvm on one host restores onto ZFS on another node without conversion gymnastics.
Veeam Community Edition is the free comparison. It works. It also caps repository size, does not dedup at the chunk level, and lacks the cluster-aware scheduling that makes PBS feel like a built-in feature rather than a bolt-on.
When backups are the load-bearing wall of a homelab, the free option that does not compromise is the one that wins.
Cluster and HA without vCenter
ESXi clustering requires vCenter Server. vCenter is its own VM, its own database, its own patching cadence, its own license. The minimum production footprint to get HA is three ESXi hosts plus one vCenter plus one shared storage volume. The vCenter VM itself is the thing that has to be backed up off the cluster it manages.
Proxmox does the same job from the per-node web UI:
$ pvecm create my-cluster
$ pvecm add 10.99.99.5 --use_ssh
$ ha-manager add ct:256 --group g5-only
pvecm create once on the first node. pvecm add from each new node. Edit corosync.conf if the auto-detect picked the wrong network for the ring. Done. HA failover policy is one ha-manager add per workload. No separate management plane.
Three-node cluster running. The workload migrated to a different node on the night I shut down one of the cluster members. Total observability downtime: about 90 seconds.
Honest tradeoffs
This is the section where opinionated posts usually flinch. The tradeoffs are real.
Ecosystem. VMware has decades of third-party integrations across storage vendors, backup vendors, networking overlays, and security tooling. Proxmox has fewer. If you need a specific compliance-certified storage appliance or a vendor tooling chain, VMware is sometimes the only option.
Audit logging. Proxmox logs the basics. Deep audit trails with role hierarchy, per-action attestation, and tamper-evident storage are an ESXi plus Aria stack feature with no Proxmox equivalent. For SOC 2, HIPAA, or FedRAMP work this matters. For a homelab and a small team it does not.
Support. The Proxmox Enterprise subscription exists and is reasonable. The contract is not the same as VMware's. For 24/7 white-glove production support, ESXi still wins. For the small-team case, the community forums and the wiki are usually faster anyway.
At small scale Proxmox wins on tooling unification, on free-tier capability, and on the speed at which you can change your mind. At enterprise scale the tradeoffs reverse.
What kept me here
I have not reconsidered in two years because the daily friction is low. The web UI does what I want, the CLI is consistent across LXC and VM, and the backup story stays one tool. Migrating a service from one node to another is two commands; when a node falls over the cluster handles it.
The homelab keeps growing. Every additional service is a new LXC or VM in the same pane of glass. The platform has not forced a new toolchain on me to keep up.
The right tool depends on the scale you actually operate at. For mine, it's Proxmox.
Resources
- Proxmox VE documentation
- Proxmox Backup Server
- Where this fits: the homelab is a three-node cluster (a legacy DL380 G7 plus two EliteDesk G5s), with a WRX90 Threadripper Pro tower planned to replace the G7 as the third permanent node. More on the cluster build in a future post.
