Building Your First Proxmox Home Lab

1. Choose your hardware

A refurbished mini-PC (Lenovo Tiny, HP EliteDesk, Dell OptiPlex) or a small tower with an Intel i5/i7 and 32–64 GB of RAM is more than enough for a first lab. Add at least one NVMe SSD for VMs and a larger spinning disk for ISO storage and backups.

2. Install Proxmox cleanly

Flash the official ISO to a USB stick, install on the SSD, and immediately:

• Remove the enterprise repository
• Add the no-subscription repository
• Update the system
• Set a strong root password and disable password SSH login

3. VM vs. LXC

Use LXC containers for lightweight Linux services (Pi-hole, Nginx Proxy Manager, Tailscale router). Use VMs for anything that needs a full kernel or a non-Linux OS (Home Assistant OS, Windows, TrueNAS).

4. Storage layout

A typical layout is: local-lvm for VM disks on NVMe, a ZFS pool on HDDs for backups and ISOs, and an NFS mount from your NAS for shared data.

5. Networking

Create a Linux bridge (vmbr0) bound to your physical NIC. For isolation, add VLAN-aware bridges so you can put IoT, guest, and management traffic on separate subnets.

6. Backups

Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) is the killer companion. Run it as a VM on a NAS or a second box, schedule nightly snapshots, and verify them weekly.