Proxmox

Proxmox VE is an open-source virtualisation platform — a genuine alternative to VMware for running multiple virtual machines and containers on a single physical server. It’s become a popular choice for small businesses and homelabs alike, largely because it does most of what the big commercial hypervisors do without the licensing cost.

We’ve used Proxmox in production for client environments, not just in a homelab. That includes setting up clustering, configuring storage (ZFS in particular) properly rather than with default settings, and making sure backups actually restore rather than just exist.

It’s also what a lot of our own homelab and testing infrastructure runs on, which means troubleshooting a Proxmox issue isn’t a first-time exercise — it’s something we’ve hit and fixed before. See Linux and homelab support for the wider picture of what that covers, including pfSense and OPNsense for the networking side of a Proxmox build.