Proxmox is an open-source bare metal virtualization system I use in my homelab. Proxmox supports clustering, high availability and backup using industry standard tools running on relatively mod-free Debian Linux, qemu and kvm. It supports any hardware supported by Debian, which makes use in a lab environment practical – after running VMWare’s vSphere and Nutanix CE and dealing with stringent hardware compatibility lists, I can appreciate a hypervisor that I can throw at any hardware I have in my collection.

Proxmox VE version 7.4 has been released and as minor releases have gone, the upgrade from 7.3 to 7.4 went flawlessly, only requiring a reboot when convenient to load a new kernel. There are the usual upgrades to the Kernel (now at 5.15), QEMU, kvm, and ceph.

Proxmox VE’s UI now lets you sort guest resources by name, which makes organizing VMs much cleaner – even in a small homelab like mine, with a handful of Linux containers, a Docker host, and a small AD test environment.

There’s also a dark mode switch in the UI now, much handier than applying a mode setting that gets reset every time you reboot.

The open-source architectures riscv32 and riscv64 can be used for LXC containers. I’m interested in trying these out to expand my homelab to architectures other than i386 and x64.

If you’re thinking of installing (or upgrading) Proxmox, I’d recommend taking a look at my earlier posts: Proxmox First Steps and Proxmox Helper Scripts For helpful tips on setup and streamlining ongoing maintenance of your Proxmox system.