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If you know your way around Linux you most likely don’t need Proxmox and its pseudo-open-source... you can try Incus / LXD instead.
Avoid Proxmox and safe yourself a LOT of headaches down the line. Go with Debian 12 + Incus/LXC, it runs VMs and containers very well. Proxmox ships with an old kernel that is so mangled and twisted that they shouldn’t even be calling it a Linux kernel. Also their management daemons and other internal shenanigans will delay your boot and crash your systems under certain circumstances.
LXD/Incus provides a management and automation layer that really makes things work smoothly - essentially what Proxmox does but properly done. With Incus you can create clusters, download, manage and create OS images, run backups and restores, bootstrap things with cloud-init, move containers and VMs between servers (even live sometimes).
Another big advantage is the fact that it provides a unified experience to deal with both containers and VMs, no need to learn two different tools / APIs as the same commands and options will be used to manage both. Even profiles defining storage, network resources and other policies can be shared and applied across both containers and VMs.
I draw your attention to containers (not docker), LXC containers because for most people full virtualization isn't even required. In a small homelab if you can have containers that behave like full operating systems (minus the kernel) including persistence, VMs might not be required. Either way LXD/Incus will allow for both and you can easily mix and match and use what you require for each use case. Hell, you can even run Docker inside an LXC container.
For eg. I virtualize the official HomeAssistant image with Incus because we all know how hard is to get that thing running, however my NAS / Samba shares are just a LXD Debian 12 container with Samba4, Nginx and FileBrowser. Same goes for torrent client that has its own container. Some other service I've exposed to the internet also runs a full VM for isolation.
Like Proxmox, LXD/Incus isn’t about replacing existing virtualization techniques such as QEMU, KVM and libvirt, it is about augmenting them so they become easier to manage at scale and overall more efficient. I can guarantee you that most people running Proxmox today it today will eventually move to Incus and never look back. It woks way better, true open-source, no bugs, no delayed security updates, no BS licenses and way less overhead.
Also, let's consider something, why use Proxmox when half of it’s technology (the container part) was made by the same people who made LXD/Incus? I mean Incus is free, well funded and can be installed on a clean Debian system with way less overhead and also delivers both containers and VMs.
Yes, there's an optional WebUI for it as well!
Some documentation for you:
Okay, i was able to take some time and play with Incus. i really like it. I had set it up on a clean VPS and attempted to set up Dendrite in a container. I had some issues getting the traffic to route appropriately to the Incus container and I didn't have as much time to sit back and play with the settings. It was the first time I was set ting up Dendrite and I had a ton of issues with that in of itself, so i just wiped the VPS and installed Dendrite w/o the use of Incus to get a good understanding of how to get it set up correctly and federate it, etc. Now that I know that I think I am going to give this another try. I like the web UI as well, but since i use an iPhone i wasn't really able to be able to set up the browser with the cert, which in the long run isn't a big deal. overall, outside of the firewall settings, it was super easy to setup and get moving. thanks again for the recommendation.
One thing you can do (that I have in the corporate) is to setup a reverse proxy in front of the WebUI and have it manage user authentication. Essentially nginx authenticates users against the company Keycloak IdP that provides SSO and whatnot. You can do with a simple HTTP basic auth or some simpler solution like phpAuthRequest.
You're welcome, enjoy.