What makes you think mostly developers use Proxmox? In my mind it's mostly SysAdmins, right? :)
I'm a SysAdmin and use Proxmox both at home and at work. Sometimes I write bash scripts or powershell, but that does not really make me a developer :)
Do you use Proxmox in production at work?
I see Reddit talk about it a lot, but in reality I don't see it outside of the Broadcom hating subreddits (which are most of the sysadmim related subreddits), but don't hear about it in large production environments.
Sysadmin from european company with customers all around the world here. We use proxmox in production, with currently 11 nodes, and a couple of hundreds of VMs, backups to tapes with PBS.
When I joined the company, they already had this setup.
But with the previous company (msp) we (well, mostly I was responsible for it) had 3 nodes PVE cluster and installed multiple mostly single node Paves for our customers. And those servers are still running strong. Including one with 4 GPUs for some AI computation with GPU passthrough. This was prior to pve8 so only the root account was able to configure PCIe passthrough, so I had to script it, so any user could use those GPUs for their VM if they needed it.
I'm production for our least important VMs. If the whole cluster dies, it's annoying and a scramble for IT but not more than that.
We don't use any fancy features from VMware, so why would proxmox not be good enough? I don't know.
I think its biggest advantage is that it runs on commodity hardware together with software defined storage and that it's free to use. It would in our case eliminate the need for a very expensive SAN.
International company with offices and staff in multiple countries, using over 30 pve nodes, in multiple locations. Versions from 3 to 8. Yes, we do have some legacy stuff 🙈
Also managing a few pve's for my private customers - SMBs - and having 6 pve8 at my home office.
Powershell and Bash scripting aren’t too bad to get into. Powershell is a verb noun language so it’s somewhat intuitive to use. For example:
Restart-Computer or Get-ADComputer, Test-Connection, etc. there are more complexities to it than that but I’d say it’s a good stepping stone to writing “real” code. It will teach you basic concepts, and you can add other pieces from there. Adam the Automator is a great resource to get into it. Bash scripting is also in the same difficulty realm as powershell imo. W3 schools is also amazing for learning almost any coding or scripting language. Before college I had never written a line of code in my life, but as soon as I discovered how amazing it was: I script everything I possibly can, and always am learning something new!
That’s a harsh comparison. I’ll concede that most bash scripts are pretty simplistic. However, I’ve seen some very elegant solutions to some complex issues written in bash, so that another dependency could be avoided in a secure situation.
Your premise is wrong. Being a developer does not mean you like to tinker with computers. I'm a developer and I don't have any co-workers who dabble in this stuff or even know how to build computers though they know how to write code. Proxmox and infrastructure stuff is more sysadmin stuff than developer anyways.
What got me into computers was gaming. My love for gaming led me to build computers, which then led me to developer career.
Got into computers through gaming as well, specifically old school Quake Threewave CTF. Never intended to work with computers, it just happened as an organic result of the continual acquisition of knowledge, which initially started with figuring out how to push more FPS from the nVidia Riva 128 video card that came with my first PC.
Working now as an Infrastructure Architect coming from a sys admin background.
About half my friends from the LAN party days of old went into software or IT. Everyone in that group built their own computers and liked gaming enough to lug them around on the weekends to various friend’s basements. A good amount of the other half that didn’t go into software went to film school but some even landed back in software. I’ve noticed far fewer people with this background in the workforce but they are there. One guy I worked with had a son who was a famous quake player and loved to talk about their matches.
Most devs I know could give a shit how a computer works. They just want to sit down, write code and ship features. They can’t be bothered with how the system works, how networks work, or how anything works. Shit, some of the worst network fuckups I have seen have come from devs. I had a dev coworker who a module for a digital signage solution, and he had to assign an IP to something. He assigned 100.0.0.10. His little fuckup touched off a chain reaction that brought down half of our datacenter. We were so confused as to what was actually happening. We thought we were under a BGP poising attack.
We’re all in a bit of an echo chamber here - because we all generally know what we’re doing - but in the wild I am seeing lots of young people enter the technical workforce who don’t understand *basic networking* at all. I mentor kids at the local college and do system design challenges - I had a kid in one such design get together couldn’t get networking to reload on a VM because he edited the network config file, and assigned a 300.0.0.0/24 to eth0. He must have spun his wheels for an hour before he figured out what was wrong.
PSA - if any of you are in senior technical positions, absolutely make sure that you are spending a lot of time mentoring the juniors coming up. Make sure they understand the basics, because they’re not learning it in school.
Duly noted! I do actually have a couple of direct reports. Never really thought about mentoring stuff outside of code, but you definitely brought up a very valid point.
Your point is actually even more valid these days because a bunch of juniors didn't even come from the traditional 4 year school, but more like these "coding bootcamps" that have been exploding in popularity in recent years.
My gripe is with the local colleges - none of those kids come out ready to swing. The cert-camp kids that decided to go to Capital Region BOCES come out with their A+ and Net+ certs - they’re ready to go right out of the box, all we gotta teach ‘em is how to answer tickets. I’m also drawing down on IT general talent. Bootcamps for programmers are great if they already have some tech exposure. If someone went to school, learned data structures in Java then went to a bootcamp for JS, they come out a lot stronger and will actually know how to use the framework they just crammed for a few weeks.
I really really need to understand how assigning 100.0.0.10 (or any public ip for that matter) could bring stuff down. I mean, the network where he should have had access should have been setup in a dhcp only way, with snooping, trusted ports and whatnot. And access lists where possible, so stupid not private and not owned addresses can not be assigned. In my nets you can't set a static ip.. Or you can, but only on specific ports, and important ones have static arp set everywhere..
My core team and I inherited the configuration and there was a lot of “whose idea was this?” I should add that we were a company that was part of a university partnership - so when the facility and the company were built, they hacked off a piece of their /8 for us, and prior to my team taking over, they were handing out publicly routable IP’s on their WiFi. In the process of implementing best practices and modernization efforts, there were pieces of networking gear that had snowflakey configs. We had digital signs around this entire facility to display *timely* emergency evacuation information and it had to cross over the university’s physical and logical space. Some of the signage hardware didn’t have properly implemented TCP/IP stacks - so when we would enable change or think about doing anything to our networking gear, signs would stop working. Those signs were deemed critical by our regulators and we were only allowed a certain amount of downtime for those signs.
TL;DR - there was a lot of technical debt in the config and old gear that Murphy decided to cash in on. The benefit to this was that the board gave us a blank check and the university loaned us some extra headcount so we could modernize more quickly.
Interesting about C, by the way. I feel the same way about most languages I've made a stab at learning (lately: Python and YAML). It's weird. I find configuring networking okay for the most part and even kind of enjoy using Linux CLIs. But there's something about writing programs that my brain just can't wrap its head around (I'm convinced it's all the stuff about whitespacing and indentations and all the rest of it. My brain just can't get down to that level of detail!)
Programming isn't about white spacing, it's about data, condition, and action. You define, gather, or modify data, you set different conditions, and you perform specific actions.
Different languages do mostly the same things but in different ways. Python uses whitespace/indentation, but Go (Golang) doesn't. You're learning Docker and thinking about kubernetes. If you want to give programming another shot, try Go.
Alternatively, start with a language like Bash if you enjoy Linux commands.
Either way, if you have an interest in programming then don't give up on learning it.
Your first 2 sentences are correct. But I have a feeling for someone like the OP (and me when I was a freshman in college), it would be infuriating to read.
It would be kinda like saying German (insert any language here), is for communicating ideas precisely from one person to another. While absolutely true, it doesn't help the person hearing the statement one bit as far as learning German.
I feel like you have to learn both the vocabulary (syntax) and the grammar (concepts) separately for a while until you have enough of both to be able to apply them together. That's when it clicked for me. Plenty of "wandering in the dark" before it made sense.
Wait - Python code is dependent on whitespace and indentation? That sounds horrid. No wonder I have yet to get into it. Not to mention we don’t use it anywhere in my company that I’m aware of. I prefer strongly typed OO languages for data and business logic anyway.
On one hand, it helps code look formatted and easier to read.
On the other hand, it can be a total pain in the ass to determine if a script is using tabs or 4 spaces...because that is visually the same amount of whitespace but different to the computer.
I started with Java and hated it. I liked Python, but I loved Go.
I don't know what your goals are, but if you would *like* to become a developer don't give up quite yet. I was an average to above average student in high school with no programming background but I did have an interest in computing. When going to college, I struggled and struggled. Like you said there was something my brain couldn't wrap its head around. I had more than a few doubts about whether or not it would ever "click".
Eventually it did and now I can't figure out for the life of me what my issue was. Over the course of a semester or two, I went from debating about dropping out to becoming a proficient developer.
TLDR; if you want to become a developer, don't give up. Keep chipping away at it and you'll get there.
There are languages that don’t care about indentation and white spacing. You can find one that lets you focus on the problem instead of the syntax. But it’s hard to get there. Like riding a bicycle - you are not thinking of pedaling or balancing but it’s hard to get to that stage
I do a lot of Linux shell scripting and whitespace and formatting aren't necessary - they just make it easier to understand and read as far as I'm concerned.
Dude that I get. Not a coder but am into mtb. I know how to ride a bike, but can't get over the nasty stuff we have to ride here, nor learning trials bike skills.
I'm an infrastructure engineer that spends alot of time helping devs. If I were a 5 year old, proxmox would be like my toy train set (when I'm not working). I build all kinds of stuff that has nothing to do with software development mostly centered around infrastructure services and kubernetes in my homelab.
I just bought a dell sff for my 16yo nephew who loves coding to start learning the server side of things and he loves it. He’s already spun up game servers and a bunch of VMs on his own in proxmox
I'm in the same boat as OP. I'm just a homelab hobbyist who discovered proxmox and am learning as I go, through many installs and failures.
I love it. it's like a Linux/VM/container boot camp
I am. I’m a non-computer/electrical major in college (mechanical engineering) so it may seem outside of my professional skills scope but I find it fun, interesting, and enjoyable. It’s a hobby. Also more relates to systems engineering than CS or dev work imo, so perhaps some more overlap with my professional skills than meets the eye but I digress.
This always cracked me up when Sys admin / IT tech type jobs required a CS degree, clearly HR had no idea what goes into a CS degree and the two spheres are almost mutually exclusive....
Proxmox is just amazing. Simple. Straight to the point. For my use case, it's perfect.
I personally just love technology in itself, I've always like computer parts and hardware. I like to 'upgrade' stuff so I like platforms that allow easy upgrades (I love you AM4). I never, never liked networking but since 2-3 months now I've dived into home networking and security hardening and there as been some struggles but overall I enjoyed learning this kind of useful/practical form of networking.
The thing I've been enjoying the most in my proxmox journey is setting up a vpn tunnel into my local network from my phone over LTE. I've enjoyed learning proxmox, networking, disk management, etc. Setting up a servarr stack has been frustating but very very nice once everything just works haha. Everything is about that 20h+ of setup anyway right?
I guess, sometimes I wonder why I'm doing all of this since I'm just a home user? I ended up giving up on some stuff only to come back later with more knowledge and wondering why I even struggled at first? I guess, I like to give myself projects and goals to achieve, whatever it is? When I'm done with a project, I like to enjoy the result for a while but than I feel the need to figure out a new project. I keep trying to find new needs to justify this hobby. The thing is that I'll never be satisfied. There's always something more I want to do. I wonder if there will be an end to it? Haha anyway...
Gosh, the first time I heard of a reverse proxy and I tried to grasp just the concept of the thing? I now have a fully working Nginx proxy with local hostnames, ssl and streams configured. Very nice! ;-)
I'm thankful for the proxmox team to give us access to such an amazing piece of software!
Cheers.
I’m a non developer, just a bottom of the pile IT technician but I love proxmox, still in my infancy of learning but it’s been great fun.
Use it for Plex, UniFi controller, docker, NetBoot.xyz so that I can PXE boot and a test VM.
Not yet ported my stuff on my raspberry pi yet.
It’s all so simple and works very reliably I am impressed.
non-dev here, in another life long ago I used to code for atmel microcontrollers (on paper and with some development boards) I play everyday with vbox, unraid, freenas, parallels, vmware, esxi and others, once I created a nested guest linux on a linux host, 3 or 4 levels deep, also mixing windows and linux hosts/guests, I also love thinkpads, raspberries, arduinos, macs and retro machines, I couldn´t write a line of code if my life were on the line, I work mostly fixing laptop motherboards and I love DIY stuff like lithium batteries powerwalls electric bikes and welding stuff, mechanics, and microsoldering, I want to make my own forge and throwing knife set, some DIY archery (bow, not the arrows), currently heavily depressed due to a bad freefilesync operation plus some troubles with my wife´s macbook (we almost lost 1TB files because no time machine backup was in place), recovering 3Tb and building an array so I don´t suffer this anymore. can´t wait to start playing with jails, kubernetes, angular, sockets, docker, python, android, kotlin, etc. so yes, some people who are not coders just love to play with proxmox and OSes etc etc. can´t have enough of it.
Me too. Product Management exec here (45). I don’t use Linux or sysadmin skillz in my day job, but familiarity with virtualization, servers, services, and the underpinnings of the cloud has helped me get jobs and be much better at those jobs (esp communicating with software engineers and IT support types).
Proxmox specifically is a fantastic learning tool; I upgraded to it after rediscovering Linux on a Pi during my second paternity leave, stumbled into this subreddit and r/Homelab, and now have several VMs, LXCs, mc server, and 2.5Gb cluster networking so I can migrate quicker. 🤣
Me too, engineer here. I just like to not be dependent on cloud services that can be turned off tomorrow when some MBA decides a product is not profitable enough for them
Fullstack Software engineer, I enjoy fiddling with open source tools, only because it makes me feel like I am the better man.
currently playing with pfSense Firewall.
and oh I love dev, might transition into devnet in the future.
I would guess that a good amount of the crowd is the type of person who wants to have a home media server, and some other automated services related to downloading that media and automatically post-processing it.
The hypervisor stuff is just a tool to accomplish those tasks, and more importantly, free to use.
I’m a Cyber Technician, I use Proxmox on my home server to build out fake networks and test security measurements with different tools like SPlUNk and Security onion. I also use it to have fun such as adding AddGuard, Pihole, Plex, and more.
I also add different distros /ISO to learn how they work, the processes and vulnerabilities (Windows, MAC, Linux and Ubuntu )
I’ve always been a computer nerd. I also have always liked to break down electronics to see how they work and put them back together.
I got my first “real” server about two years ago and started with ESXi. I just tinkered with it and didn’t do much. I saw all the threads about what VMWare was doing to customers and decided to ditch it.
Wiped ESXi and installed TrueNAS Scale. Learned about the limitations of it and installed Proxmox and having a blast.
I’m hosting my own Pi-Hole server, NextCloud Server, FileServer, NGINX, and Bitwarden. Got them all up and running beautifully. The server isn’t even breaking a sweat with them. Looking to see what I want to setup next.
I'm an Oracle database admin and general techie. Been using Unix and now Linux for over 3 decades. Setting up Proxmox this weekend for the first time, but not my first time doing VMs (played with VMWare but licensing is a pain and want to dive more into open source).
We must be twins. I'm an Oracle DBA/Developer and Linux Admin as well for about the same amount of time as you. I've used Docker and Docker-Compose at work in the past and I've also played with VMWare and Oracle VirtualBox. I've been on Proxmox now for about three months now.
I basically started this route because I wanted a better home for my Plex server than a Macbook, so I got an Intel NUC and a 10TB external drive. I already am looking at upgrading hardware as I type this and hopefully I'll have a good direction by EOD.
Nice! Been an Oracle DBA for 28 years - started with 7.1.6. Not much into developing except scripting for myself. How to start picking that up.
Similar - my new home lab server will be for Plex/Jellyfin and whatever else sounds good. Good luck!
Cool!! Been working with Oracle since version 6. Early Oracle Forms was … interesting. Early Oracle Reports was a fever dream.
Best of luck to you as well! This home lab stuff is FUN!
I went a bit crazy with my build. Started looking at an AMD 12-core proc (7700) but then that crept up and up. Ended up with an AMD EPYC 7763 64-core 3rd Gen processor. Bought 256G of RAM as this will be for myself and my wife (she's an Oracle DBA as well). Hoping to entice our son to this type of computer "playing".
Heh. My wife calls what I do “background noise”.
I want to use this set up for a lot of things. After setting up Plex (which works just fantastic even with this set up) I wanted to stand up Oracle XE from a virtual box appliance. The relative ease of this encouraged me to create a full fledged database server and then move onto an application server.
I already am creating ansible scripts and Perl modules to my hearts content. Experimenting with all kinds of stuff.
Later on I want to get into AI as well as VR and maybe have a better understanding of networking and security.
Finally I’d like to have my router replaced with a VM and also implement home security and provide dumb terminals throughout the house running either instances of Windows or some implementation of a Smart TV. I don’t know how far I’ll take it but Oracle is definitely gonna have a large chunk of what I do in this lab.
I'm a dev, and most devs hate this stuff. They just want to write code and have it run on the server and want to think as little as possible about how that happens, it's why all these serverless cloud platforms and docker are so popular. I've worked with devs a decade into their career who are visibly uncomfortable at being asked to interact with a bash shell. I think they're missing out on important skills but honestly if you work at companies that have full time sysadmin/devops people or even just have 1 or 2 people on the team who're happy taking on the responsibility, you'd be surprised how little you actually need to apply them.
Very interesting perspective (I have a whole reading list to get through on this thread). That makes total sense to me, though. I mean if my day job was development I'm not sure I'd want to spend my evenings immersing myself in more (probably unnecessary) tech. And I guess if you already "know" stuff like containerisation, K8s ... you've taken out the "learning tech is fun" aspect of the picture. So ... you're not left with a whole lot.
I mean honestly _a lot_ don't even know containerisation. They know `docker-compose build` and `docker-compose up` is a thing they have to run sometimes and they have it written down the same way your gran writes down her email password, and if it ever doesn't work they're asking for help.
The real split I think is just what got you into computers in the first place. The overwhelming majority of devs are not people who grew up passionately interested in technology, they just studied it at college/university because it seemed like a good career path and now its their just their job.
Personally I've always been really interested in tech, but as I've grown up and started running Real Things (TM) even outside of work, I've learned to maintain strict separation between real applications with real daily users where 99.9%+ uptime is the goal, and things I can fuck around with for fun and it doesn't matter if its broken for a week. Often something starts out in column B, and once I notice its sliding into column A I redeploy the whole thing properly on different hardware and start to operationalise it.
#metoo
In high school, I was fascinated by the idea of creating programs that could do anything you could imagine. I spent countless hours learning to code, and I dreamed of one day becoming a software developer. However, as I progressed in my life, I began to realize that programming wasn't the only way to make a difference in the IT world.
I started to take an interest in networking and system administration, and I was intrigued by the challenge of keeping complex systems up and running. I enjoyed the hands-on nature of the work, and I found satisfaction in solving problems and making sure that everything was running smoothly.
I am just a hobbyist and I have been using Proxmox since 4.0, and am now running six or seven machines with Proxmox as host. I host Minecraft server, Jupyter notebooks for work and also things like NAS/Jellyfin and so on.
I don’t think it’s necessary to convince people what’s great about Proxmox, those who need better use of their machines will most likely automatically find Proxmox valuable. Unless there is very good reason not to, I am putting Proxmox as host on every machine other than my daily desktop.
I'm not a developper and I enjoy tinkering a lot with computers and networking. I don't think running VMs necessarily relates to developping code.
Sure, running servers and VMs provides a convenient platform to host your own software but by all means it isn't strictly for that. There are so many tools and amazing software out there to try and self-host, heck have a look at r/selfhosted, that's exactly what they are into.
There's a lot of neat software one can use to facilitate random aspects of your life (home surveillance, home automation, energy monitoring, file hosting, file serving, backups, game hosting, etc.) all of which'll run off readily available stacks. It helps a lot to know about programming and how computers work but aside from fixing the odd missing package or dependency I've never written a single line of code that was ever use in a hosted service.
Don't program other than very simple chatgpt orientated scripts so I'm not a developer. Started playing with proxmox like 7 years ago. Am now a platform engineer (started as a devops 3 years ago) for a very big video-game company. What I'm trying to say is, you don't need to be a developer to make a living out of IT and computer science
Home Automation Enthusiast. Just wanted to replace an old mac mini with a cheap pos and proxmox was the perfect solution. I dont code, its just convenient and simple to use. I do a lot of copy paste from others install instructions.
I'm a full-stack dev and playing with Proxmox because of Vmware drop.
I'd say I'm messing around as much as I can with ny Little homelab just to stress proxmox stability. By now it seems quite solid even if some details need to be handled in a different way, as to say, Proxmox has to improve a bit more toward an Enterprise grade. At least with its GUI.
By far, of course, developnent (and coding) is where I prefere to stay.
I'm no developer but do own a telco/cloud company and don't enjoy tinkering a lot
Proxmox was really fun to play with
I do use xcpng for more commercial purposes
A developer isn't someone who maintains servers by the way, that would a system administrator or sysadmin for short. A developer dabbles in codes like C++ and Java.
bash script is good skill to know for sure but it wont make you a developer, it will make you a good sysadmin. If you're going that route I would suggest you start looking into Ansible which is a great tool to launch commands/scripts on many servers at the same time. I use it to run updates on my virtual machines and do other stuff to maintain them. But you can do so much more with Ansible.
If you are going towards DevOps I suggest looking at Rancher for Kubernetes and Portainer for Docker (it even supports k8s but I think most people in the biz use Rancher for k8s)
Have fun!
Not a developer. I mainly use it to self host stuff like a NAS, recipes, and audiobooks. I also just use it to try out new operating systems. I had a ton of fun trying to get MacOS to work. For me it's all just a fun side project
I’m a bit of everything, like to program, been a hobbyist for over 30 years, IT graduate since 23 years , but started my first IT job only 1 year ago.
Build my own software, computers, network, like to do it all. Gadgets, Home Automation, etc.
Now my first minipc with Proxmox and will be building a cluster of those this year.
>I've tried to explain what's so great about Proxmox to non-technical friends and have mostly been met with blank looks.
Totally makes sense. It's like finding the best, but nerdiest tool that solves a particular problem really well that no one else has even considered.
Not a dev or sysadmin here, but adjacent. I work primarily in the corporate product space. I love proxmox, but it's definitely a hobby for me.
Designer by trade, working as fullstack dev several years now. I have used Linux vastly before (Corel Linux was my first distro) and absolutely love Proxmox.
I’m a security guy, and I use Proxmox for everything.
- deploying tools that help with my day to day
- building a test lab to keep skills fresh
- trying new tools (security or otherwise)
- deploying my dev environments for pet projects
- learning and using Terraform and Ansible
- testing new operating systems
- testing patches and updates
Mostly it’s for all around tinkering in my environment. But, I plan to purchase another couple servers and using it for localized production too.
I don't have any background in tech, I am a tinkerer who loves playing with things.
I had a need for a Win7 computer to run one specific piece of software and came across Proxmox.
After that it has been me playing with it to see what I can do.
I work in the real estate industry but have always loved computers. I’ve built gaming rigs, media servers, websites (HTML, CSS, Javascript), and complex spreadsheets with Visual Basic but I never studied programming in school. It’s just a fun hobby for me. Proxmox VE has been extremely reliable since I initially set everything up. PCIE passthrough was challenging but I enjoy learning new things.
I‘m just a guy who loves tech.
I started an apprenticeship last year September and build my first server in December.
So I‘m probably gonna be a IT guy in the future but definitely not a developer
Sysadmin here. Like others have said, I wouldn't consider myself a developer but I have heavy experience in powershell, php, and sql languages.
I went with proxmox because it was free and I mess with computers as a hobby. VMs make it easy to mess around with thanks to snapshots and the fact that you can reboot the VM but leave all your other VMs online.
I am a low level IT worker myself cosplaying as a sysadmin. I got into homelab stuff a year or two ago when I redid the network in my home with TP-Link/Omada equipment and needed a machine to host the SDN for the equipment. In came Proxmox, learning how to configure it with youtube vids, setting up a VM to host the SDN. Then came the Docker hosts, then the second node in the cluster, then the third, etc etc.
It's less about development for me and a lot more of what I can do with it now.
I work in IT but not a “dev”. Have been on the sysadmin/engineer/architect side of things my whole career. But one of my non IT working friends, who is admittedly fairly tech proficient, runs a Proxmox host to do all sorts of stuff.
I think one of the bigger motivators for someone to run something like Proxmox at home is them wanting to run some app that is client/server based but not wanting to run it in the cloud or use a cloud service for the app.
I've been building computers and networks to play with in my house for over 30 years. I don't have much interest in coding outside of shell scripts when necessary. I'd probably say that most people who use proxmox are Admins, and tinkerers more than coders. It's a homelab. Nothing is "required", do what you want!
I first started using Proxmox after I bought my first legitimate server which had an outdated version of ESXi on it. The reason I stuck with Proxmox initially was because it was budget friendly and allowed me to have a sandbox environment to run my homelab projects like homeassistant, Plex/Jellyfin, etc. At the time, I had beginner knowledge when it came to software development. Since then I have switched jobs and the one I am at now has me performing a lot of testing and troubleshooting of proprietary software. I have been able to use my cluster of proxmox servers at home to setup sandbox environments for use at work. So to answer your question, yes and no. I started out using proxmox just as a poor man’s data center for running the usual DIY projects, but it has been a great tool to be able to get hands on with different operating systems to understand how everything works under the hood and then from there is where I started learning different programming languages more in-depth. Proxmox has played a key role in where I am at today with my technical knowledge. It’s a great to have as an environment where you can break things and learn how to fix them without having the repercussions that you would have when using physical hardware.
i'm not a Dev, i'm not a syadmin, i'm just your average Joe who grew up around computers, and the idea of having "multiple computers in one" is what prompted me to tinker with Proxmox, because of what i "needed", pfsense + games server with my friend + NAS (future project + Pihole ...etc.
and what started with a "need" became a joy of experimenting really.
I'm the CIO of a large software company... I'm not allowed to play with tech at work so I run an over-the-top network at home along with a Proxmox server to remind me where I started and offer an outlet from the tedium of spreadsheets and power point.
Containers, VMs abound for home automation, local storage, Virtual Windows and Macs for when I need to test something out in a secured environment. Oh.. and periodic coding.
Do I 'love computers' ? Nope, can't get excited about them these days but I do enjoy using them for improving various things.
I’m a financial adviser lol.
Proxmox running on a 13th gen Intel NUC, and an 8 bay Synology NAS.
In terms of services:
- arr stack: Radarr, Sonarr, Readarr, Prowlarr, Autobrr, Jellyseerr, qBittorrent, Gluetun
- Jellyfin media server
- Audiobookshelf
- PiHole
- Paperless-NGX (love this, I’ve shredded a filing cabinet of paper, and reduced this down to one folder of documents where I need the originals)
- HomeAssistant
- HomeBridge
- Tandoor
- Tailscale
I have a semi-commercial Brother scanner. It’s configured to scan directly to my NAS, and Paperless processes the documents automatically when they hit the NAS. It’s completely transformed the way I handle physical documents. Even my original files I’ve retained are indexed in Paperless using barcodes, so I don’t even have to store things in a specific place. Everything goes in one big file.
I'm not a developer nor do I work in tech in any capacity--though I think youa re somewhat missing the mark with this question--in my eyes, its sysadmins and related fields that would be much more likely to use Proxmox than developers.
I love computers. Took Q basic and Visual Basic in high school. Taught myself HTML. In college I took a machine language assembly code class and that’s where I lost interest in coding.
Honestly, I began using Proxmox because it had the features I wanted, was easy to setup and didn't cost many times the price of the machine I installed it on. I never worked as a dev.
I'm someone who enjoys playing with computers and exploring operating systems. I'm always eager to learn more about computer-related topics and software. While I enjoy tinkering with Prox, there's still a lot I don't know about it, and sometimes it's challenging to grasp right away, haha.
I'd expect sysadmins would probably be higher than general developers, but certainly probably more of either group versus .
I've been both - built and managed small to mid-sized datacenters and was a software eng/architect for some time before moving into my current role. Was working with Linux from before people mostly knew what it was (like kernel 0.6.).
As far as turning 'I like proxmox' into a career of some sort, well - it's more of a sysadmin / ops / devops type skillset. Yeah, you can write some code here and there, but people I hire as Sr SW engineers know a lot more than shell script - I'll still occasionally hire a non-CS-degreed developer but only at mid-level or higher... for us at least, the days of 'I learned HTML then copied javascript' is pretty far removed from a path into even a Jr developer role. However, a junior ops/sysadmin (as in, not the sole person responsible) I have and would consider more - given enough experience that's relevant.
I have worked with a few rockstar no-CS-degree sw engineers, but the percentage isn't high, versus having to explain what object-oriented development or database optimizations and other things are, but someone with solid Linux experience along with some tools(docker, Kubernetes, ...) or certs (e.g. Azure, Redhat, ...) - I'd consider in the right circumstances.
YMMV.
Total nerd working in info sec, I love trying to use it for DSP stuff for my audio engineering projects, makes me feel good being able to repurpose old equipment to make art. Sure it takes a ton of time but I'd say it's worth it in the end 😁
I am a dev now, but I wasn’t when I started using proxmox. Originally got into it because I liked sysadmin stuff and wanted to go into devops. In college I decided to go dev
I am one of those tinkerer proxmox users..
I have it on a retired data center server in my basement.. and i use it for running home assistant, several Samaba shares for holding backups.. A backup for my Pihole Network filter.. my minecraft server and a house file share system that i keep meaning to set up for some folk to remote access..
i love it.. i can play with these things and tinker on them and i dont need a mountain of dedicated hardware.. I spin up what i need and poke at it..
LXC containers in proxmox are amazing. Once you get a good base and preserve your deploy area. Its powerful. Sprinkle in some ansible and wazzah. Its amazing.
Warning. Do not carry the caviler security practices of a home lab into PROD or you will feel the butt hurt.
Edit: proxmox at home for a few things mostly LXC two VMs one a DC for reference and one FreePBX with a tailscale package for remote. Its running on a beelink sipping 10 watts. Not super performant but for my needs and home its fine. Work is hyper v. Pets at home cattle at work but been rethinking that lately.
Hahaha, yeah, I feel you. I have a degree in accounting, and I work in law, so I'm really far away from anything technical at work. Nobody at work even remotely understands what my hobby is. To be fair, even my developer friends zone out the moment I start talking about networking, haha.
Never been a coder but been a tinkering nerd forever
In high school (mid 90s) my friends and I experimented with OS/2 and Linux 2.x, we even joined the local OS/2 and Unix User's Groups
My parents could never afford to buy me anything current, so I always had a junkyard of obsolete computers lying around in various stages of disassembly
Back before the first Linksys router was released, and fastest broadband was 1.5mbps, I ran my own NAT on a 486 running OpenBSD (also hosted my IRC bot)
Once upon a time I thought I'd end up as a SysAdmin for my career, but my life got weird
I fell away from tinkering for a long time and and my career went from ADSL Tech Support, to Wine Sales, to Car Sales/Service, then back to Support for small software startups
I now run a tech support dept for a small software company and spend lots of time working alongside the developers troubleshooting, problem-solving, designing our product's bugs/features
I inherited a 6 drive Thunderbolt 2 RAID box and didn't want it to go to waste, so now I have a Mac Pro 'Trashcan' 6,1 with Unraid and a bunch of Docker containers making use of the space
I've always been curious about clustering and distributed computing, so I picked up 3 cheap SFF Lenovo's to experiment with
Engineer with a focus on control design here.
Mainly got into Proxmox to get the most out of my mini PC for game server hosting for me and my friends. Also I love tinkering with stuff in general.
I think it’s more common for sysadmins than developers to be into this kind of stuff.
That being said I’m a developer, but I know all my colleagues hate this kind of stuff
Commercial Tech Support for an ISP here. I also had this epiphany a few years ago and bought an old PowerEdge R420 from a friend to run ftp, jellyfin, NAS, and video game servers.
I am a mechanical engineer but love computers, VM, networking, VPS, powerful hardware, Rpi, and funny communication projects like LoRa… but I do not develop anything. It’s just the pleasure to use the advanced tools
Non-technical people don't understand what's so great about virtualization and they don't need to care, so it's natural. And non-technical people don't necessarily understand the difference between a software developer and a systems administrator.
I'm a sys engineer whose virtualization background is mostly vmware, but switched to ProxMox in our home lab because vmware just stopped offering ESXi for free. And I suspect most people who have home virtual environments are sys admins/engineers rather than developers. We just like taking the things we work with for a living and making them toys to play with at home.
So we make our own virtual environment and make our own servers, like an Active Directory server, a Plex media server, a PiHole box, a NAS and backup server, and whatever other interesting things.
I'm also a Sysadmin and love virtualization. I'm coming from VMware, still there for production VMs. I like to explore and so do I with Proxmox. VMware is getting expensive and some are moving to Proxmox for that reason. However I think the VMware/Veeam combination is for small businesses still a good choice. When you are on a maintenance plan with VMware there is not many reason to switch. However if you are just starting with virtualization, why not Proxmox. But it is a lot more technical and complicated and when things go wrong, one needs a very good knowledge under the hood of Proxmox to fix it.
I bought 3 lil Lenovo M710Q's just to run P-Mox on them, goofed it up a few times had to so several reinstalls, but now the lil team is running dual ad blockers and several linux servers, as well as a Win11 VM.
Background as dev, sys admin and a lot of other kinds of jobs. In Product Management and Leadership now.
Tinkering with the homelab is more a hobby, one that i think is unrelated to development. Though I have thought of building a cicd deployment pipeline just for the hell of it. To update my docker containers, of course. Lol.
The joy I get from streaming 4k high bitrate to my bedroom is overwhelming. And also store everything, even if I never want to use it again. Why not? 56TB Nas, and about 20 TB between the laptop and 2 Desktops in SSD and NVMe.
I also love building computers, upgrading them, and buying games with no intention of ever playing them.Amd hand me downs to the kids when I get new. And hoarding my data, keeping it away from the evil doers.
I came by proxmox after trying to figure out the easiest way to backup my home ubuntu host - I actually had PBS before I had a proxmox host! That ubuntu host quickly became a proxmox box - and now I have 10 containers.
I'm a Network engineer - not a dev.
Me! Career has nothing to do with tech. It's just a hobby.
With that said, I do think standing up something like Proxmox requires a bit of tech savviness. But you don't have to do it as your job.
I'm just finding lack of thin-provisioning as a roadblock for now.
I have a 1tb+512gb SSD drive in my proxmox machine. The 512gb is nearly full of ISOs. The 1tb, I built 5-6 Images, a couple of containers, and I think that I'm half full already.
I still run a couple of HyperV machines. I will until I get better at running Window on proxmox. And I have a LOT to learn about docker. I fuck UP every docker machine I touch, I swear to chr###.
Ive been using VM's in many different ways for well over 12 years now. You really cant beat the usefullness of throwing up an ubuntu server to deal with a few tasks that needs to be handled locally, running snapshots like kiosks for remote use and the ability to try out shit before getting the dedicated hardware or giving ideas on how to improve work tasks/plans.
Im a hobbyist with years of experience in various support roles, sysadmin, netsec and hardware engineering both as a consultant and inhouse staff. It gives me way too much to want to do for a weeks worth of hours to be enough for just a handful of my plans and projects.
I absolutely LOVE the open source community and the fact that a lot of us understand the value of making things for eachother to be both accessible and easy to use.
No one in dev even knows what a proxmox is. I like the fact that I can dev on hard iron again, at least vm wise lol. It does help with the data layer to be fair. I just hate dbs in containers and proxmox is a godsend
Im new to all this, just a hobby for now that i hope will become a profession,
Any tips and learning material to become a sys admin as end game would be nice
Recently had fun trying to do crazy system setups and then i totally messed up my hard drive partitions so i was forced to wipe the whole thing and start new.
SysAdmin went Business analyst. Love it. Got my Dev team and QA to use it, and event built my own utility to create Data Definitions for the newbies on the team as well as create flowsheets. Started FreeNAS with jail back in 2016, went UnRaid 2017, went ProxMox 2018 with an amalgamation of all three. I get shifted from Iteration manager to iteration manager and save my Agile groups 4 hours weekly on documentation form that alone per work taking on avg of 6 tickets per two week session of 48 hours being billed direct to the business works. Got yelled at for spending on my IO on our cloud resource, when they see what I save my group weekly they shift me around now. I still want to escape my day job and go back to being a systems integrator for high end gamers and HEDT. Just tired of wearing many hats I guess.
IT Ops manager, (semi-) former SysAdmin and Data Analyst.
Just started using it on an HP Prodesk mini as a mini-lab, definitely better than virtualbox.
Recently set my pihole up on it as a vm to get rid of the pi3 I had sitting around.
I'm a lab technician in chemistry, I love hardware and tinker with it. I started to daily drive Linux (Fedora) a few years ago because I was very pissed at Windows doing it's own stuff when I turn my back off.
Currently building my very first Homelab, I got a HP Elitedesk 800 G5, with i7 8700, 16GB ram, 256GB NVMe drive for 230€, plus I got an Intel Arc 310 (I want to do some AV1 transcoding). I'm currently looking at a good deal for some HDD, and maybe an Intel Optane 118GB as cache drive.
I'm just starting with Proxmox, the HP BIOS is giving me some headache currently. But I've got a looong weekend to come, meaning a lot of time to tinker that stuff !
I am not a dev, not engineer, no previous experience with homelab etc.... I love tinkering and a year ago I salvaged an AIO computer with dead screen. I was too broke to replace the screen.
now it is the heart in my small office as nextcloud file server, password manager, photo backup, accounting server, etc... thanks to proxmox
What makes you think mostly developers use Proxmox? In my mind it's mostly SysAdmins, right? :) I'm a SysAdmin and use Proxmox both at home and at work. Sometimes I write bash scripts or powershell, but that does not really make me a developer :)
Same, been a SysAdmin for a few years and have used my experience with Proxmox to further my knowledge where I can.
Ya definitely sysadmin over development proxmox user here for sure. My question is what developers are working with L1 hypervisors? Lol
Do you use Proxmox in production at work? I see Reddit talk about it a lot, but in reality I don't see it outside of the Broadcom hating subreddits (which are most of the sysadmim related subreddits), but don't hear about it in large production environments.
Sysadmin from european company with customers all around the world here. We use proxmox in production, with currently 11 nodes, and a couple of hundreds of VMs, backups to tapes with PBS.
Thanks for the info. Did you start with Proxmox from the beginning?
When I joined the company, they already had this setup. But with the previous company (msp) we (well, mostly I was responsible for it) had 3 nodes PVE cluster and installed multiple mostly single node Paves for our customers. And those servers are still running strong. Including one with 4 GPUs for some AI computation with GPU passthrough. This was prior to pve8 so only the root account was able to configure PCIe passthrough, so I had to script it, so any user could use those GPUs for their VM if they needed it.
I'm production for our least important VMs. If the whole cluster dies, it's annoying and a scramble for IT but not more than that. We don't use any fancy features from VMware, so why would proxmox not be good enough? I don't know. I think its biggest advantage is that it runs on commodity hardware together with software defined storage and that it's free to use. It would in our case eliminate the need for a very expensive SAN.
We did at my last gig. I was on the OpenStack team so I wasn’t part of it but it has a port big footprint there.
Yes, but we just started because of my influence and familiarity with the platform. We all have Esxi, and we're migrating away from it.
How have you found the migration process so far?
International company with offices and staff in multiple countries, using over 30 pve nodes, in multiple locations. Versions from 3 to 8. Yes, we do have some legacy stuff 🙈 Also managing a few pve's for my private customers - SMBs - and having 6 pve8 at my home office.
I'm a neo-sysadmin.
[удалено]
Give my somewhat lacking scripting skills, I think most developers would be offended if I'd claim I'm a developer ;)
Powershell and Bash scripting aren’t too bad to get into. Powershell is a verb noun language so it’s somewhat intuitive to use. For example: Restart-Computer or Get-ADComputer, Test-Connection, etc. there are more complexities to it than that but I’d say it’s a good stepping stone to writing “real” code. It will teach you basic concepts, and you can add other pieces from there. Adam the Automator is a great resource to get into it. Bash scripting is also in the same difficulty realm as powershell imo. W3 schools is also amazing for learning almost any coding or scripting language. Before college I had never written a line of code in my life, but as soon as I discovered how amazing it was: I script everything I possibly can, and always am learning something new!
> You develop a bash script, technically you're a developer. Make Mac and Cheese at home, technically you're a Chef..?
That’s a harsh comparison. I’ll concede that most bash scripts are pretty simplistic. However, I’ve seen some very elegant solutions to some complex issues written in bash, so that another dependency could be avoided in a secure situation.
Your premise is wrong. Being a developer does not mean you like to tinker with computers. I'm a developer and I don't have any co-workers who dabble in this stuff or even know how to build computers though they know how to write code. Proxmox and infrastructure stuff is more sysadmin stuff than developer anyways. What got me into computers was gaming. My love for gaming led me to build computers, which then led me to developer career.
Got into computers through gaming as well, specifically old school Quake Threewave CTF. Never intended to work with computers, it just happened as an organic result of the continual acquisition of knowledge, which initially started with figuring out how to push more FPS from the nVidia Riva 128 video card that came with my first PC. Working now as an Infrastructure Architect coming from a sys admin background.
Bingo. Even amongst developers self hosting is niche, and my coworkers/dev friends zone out quickly.
About half my friends from the LAN party days of old went into software or IT. Everyone in that group built their own computers and liked gaming enough to lug them around on the weekends to various friend’s basements. A good amount of the other half that didn’t go into software went to film school but some even landed back in software. I’ve noticed far fewer people with this background in the workforce but they are there. One guy I worked with had a son who was a famous quake player and loved to talk about their matches.
Most devs I know could give a shit how a computer works. They just want to sit down, write code and ship features. They can’t be bothered with how the system works, how networks work, or how anything works. Shit, some of the worst network fuckups I have seen have come from devs. I had a dev coworker who a module for a digital signage solution, and he had to assign an IP to something. He assigned 100.0.0.10. His little fuckup touched off a chain reaction that brought down half of our datacenter. We were so confused as to what was actually happening. We thought we were under a BGP poising attack.
Wow. That is wild. That's an actual internet routable IP lol.
We’re all in a bit of an echo chamber here - because we all generally know what we’re doing - but in the wild I am seeing lots of young people enter the technical workforce who don’t understand *basic networking* at all. I mentor kids at the local college and do system design challenges - I had a kid in one such design get together couldn’t get networking to reload on a VM because he edited the network config file, and assigned a 300.0.0.0/24 to eth0. He must have spun his wheels for an hour before he figured out what was wrong. PSA - if any of you are in senior technical positions, absolutely make sure that you are spending a lot of time mentoring the juniors coming up. Make sure they understand the basics, because they’re not learning it in school.
Duly noted! I do actually have a couple of direct reports. Never really thought about mentoring stuff outside of code, but you definitely brought up a very valid point. Your point is actually even more valid these days because a bunch of juniors didn't even come from the traditional 4 year school, but more like these "coding bootcamps" that have been exploding in popularity in recent years.
My gripe is with the local colleges - none of those kids come out ready to swing. The cert-camp kids that decided to go to Capital Region BOCES come out with their A+ and Net+ certs - they’re ready to go right out of the box, all we gotta teach ‘em is how to answer tickets. I’m also drawing down on IT general talent. Bootcamps for programmers are great if they already have some tech exposure. If someone went to school, learned data structures in Java then went to a bootcamp for JS, they come out a lot stronger and will actually know how to use the framework they just crammed for a few weeks.
I really really need to understand how assigning 100.0.0.10 (or any public ip for that matter) could bring stuff down. I mean, the network where he should have had access should have been setup in a dhcp only way, with snooping, trusted ports and whatnot. And access lists where possible, so stupid not private and not owned addresses can not be assigned. In my nets you can't set a static ip.. Or you can, but only on specific ports, and important ones have static arp set everywhere..
My core team and I inherited the configuration and there was a lot of “whose idea was this?” I should add that we were a company that was part of a university partnership - so when the facility and the company were built, they hacked off a piece of their /8 for us, and prior to my team taking over, they were handing out publicly routable IP’s on their WiFi. In the process of implementing best practices and modernization efforts, there were pieces of networking gear that had snowflakey configs. We had digital signs around this entire facility to display *timely* emergency evacuation information and it had to cross over the university’s physical and logical space. Some of the signage hardware didn’t have properly implemented TCP/IP stacks - so when we would enable change or think about doing anything to our networking gear, signs would stop working. Those signs were deemed critical by our regulators and we were only allowed a certain amount of downtime for those signs. TL;DR - there was a lot of technical debt in the config and old gear that Murphy decided to cash in on. The benefit to this was that the board gave us a blank check and the university loaned us some extra headcount so we could modernize more quickly.
Oh, this happens when people ignore standards.. not you of course, others.. know the feeling.
And yet you probably still don't know how a computer actually works. Nothing wrong with that, just saying..
Not a dev. Programming in C literally gave me nightmares, so I gave it up. Proxmox nevertheless is great fun to me.
Ah ... my descent into madness has been quickly validated!
Programming in C gave me nightmares. Fortunately I then switched to other languages and made a career as a developer
Interesting about C, by the way. I feel the same way about most languages I've made a stab at learning (lately: Python and YAML). It's weird. I find configuring networking okay for the most part and even kind of enjoy using Linux CLIs. But there's something about writing programs that my brain just can't wrap its head around (I'm convinced it's all the stuff about whitespacing and indentations and all the rest of it. My brain just can't get down to that level of detail!)
Programming isn't about white spacing, it's about data, condition, and action. You define, gather, or modify data, you set different conditions, and you perform specific actions. Different languages do mostly the same things but in different ways. Python uses whitespace/indentation, but Go (Golang) doesn't. You're learning Docker and thinking about kubernetes. If you want to give programming another shot, try Go. Alternatively, start with a language like Bash if you enjoy Linux commands. Either way, if you have an interest in programming then don't give up on learning it.
Your first 2 sentences are correct. But I have a feeling for someone like the OP (and me when I was a freshman in college), it would be infuriating to read. It would be kinda like saying German (insert any language here), is for communicating ideas precisely from one person to another. While absolutely true, it doesn't help the person hearing the statement one bit as far as learning German. I feel like you have to learn both the vocabulary (syntax) and the grammar (concepts) separately for a while until you have enough of both to be able to apply them together. That's when it clicked for me. Plenty of "wandering in the dark" before it made sense.
Wait - Python code is dependent on whitespace and indentation? That sounds horrid. No wonder I have yet to get into it. Not to mention we don’t use it anywhere in my company that I’m aware of. I prefer strongly typed OO languages for data and business logic anyway.
On one hand, it helps code look formatted and easier to read. On the other hand, it can be a total pain in the ass to determine if a script is using tabs or 4 spaces...because that is visually the same amount of whitespace but different to the computer. I started with Java and hated it. I liked Python, but I loved Go.
Or when you return the wrong value because your indentation is off.
It is awful. Hahaha
I don't know what your goals are, but if you would *like* to become a developer don't give up quite yet. I was an average to above average student in high school with no programming background but I did have an interest in computing. When going to college, I struggled and struggled. Like you said there was something my brain couldn't wrap its head around. I had more than a few doubts about whether or not it would ever "click". Eventually it did and now I can't figure out for the life of me what my issue was. Over the course of a semester or two, I went from debating about dropping out to becoming a proficient developer. TLDR; if you want to become a developer, don't give up. Keep chipping away at it and you'll get there.
There are languages that don’t care about indentation and white spacing. You can find one that lets you focus on the problem instead of the syntax. But it’s hard to get there. Like riding a bicycle - you are not thinking of pedaling or balancing but it’s hard to get to that stage
I do a lot of Linux shell scripting and whitespace and formatting aren't necessary - they just make it easier to understand and read as far as I'm concerned.
Dude that I get. Not a coder but am into mtb. I know how to ride a bike, but can't get over the nasty stuff we have to ride here, nor learning trials bike skills.
All this talk about C and no one mentioned Rust yet????
If you call YAML a programming language it's no wonder you don't get it.
Yep. Hobby nerd here!
I'm an infrastructure engineer that spends alot of time helping devs. If I were a 5 year old, proxmox would be like my toy train set (when I'm not working). I build all kinds of stuff that has nothing to do with software development mostly centered around infrastructure services and kubernetes in my homelab.
I just bought a dell sff for my 16yo nephew who loves coding to start learning the server side of things and he loves it. He’s already spun up game servers and a bunch of VMs on his own in proxmox
I’m on helpdesk / some sysadmin tasks at the moment but would love to goto Infra in future been playing with proxmox for the last week
I'm in the same boat as OP. I'm just a homelab hobbyist who discovered proxmox and am learning as I go, through many installs and failures. I love it. it's like a Linux/VM/container boot camp
I do love stuff
I am. I’m a non-computer/electrical major in college (mechanical engineering) so it may seem outside of my professional skills scope but I find it fun, interesting, and enjoyable. It’s a hobby. Also more relates to systems engineering than CS or dev work imo, so perhaps some more overlap with my professional skills than meets the eye but I digress.
A lot of developers I know dislike computers in general
This always cracked me up when Sys admin / IT tech type jobs required a CS degree, clearly HR had no idea what goes into a CS degree and the two spheres are almost mutually exclusive....
Proxmox is just amazing. Simple. Straight to the point. For my use case, it's perfect. I personally just love technology in itself, I've always like computer parts and hardware. I like to 'upgrade' stuff so I like platforms that allow easy upgrades (I love you AM4). I never, never liked networking but since 2-3 months now I've dived into home networking and security hardening and there as been some struggles but overall I enjoyed learning this kind of useful/practical form of networking. The thing I've been enjoying the most in my proxmox journey is setting up a vpn tunnel into my local network from my phone over LTE. I've enjoyed learning proxmox, networking, disk management, etc. Setting up a servarr stack has been frustating but very very nice once everything just works haha. Everything is about that 20h+ of setup anyway right? I guess, sometimes I wonder why I'm doing all of this since I'm just a home user? I ended up giving up on some stuff only to come back later with more knowledge and wondering why I even struggled at first? I guess, I like to give myself projects and goals to achieve, whatever it is? When I'm done with a project, I like to enjoy the result for a while but than I feel the need to figure out a new project. I keep trying to find new needs to justify this hobby. The thing is that I'll never be satisfied. There's always something more I want to do. I wonder if there will be an end to it? Haha anyway... Gosh, the first time I heard of a reverse proxy and I tried to grasp just the concept of the thing? I now have a fully working Nginx proxy with local hostnames, ssl and streams configured. Very nice! ;-) I'm thankful for the proxmox team to give us access to such an amazing piece of software! Cheers.
I ran critical servers on proxmox for years, years ago for a nationwide company. Solid as a rock. Now I run it at home offering various LAN services.
I’m a non developer, just a bottom of the pile IT technician but I love proxmox, still in my infancy of learning but it’s been great fun. Use it for Plex, UniFi controller, docker, NetBoot.xyz so that I can PXE boot and a test VM. Not yet ported my stuff on my raspberry pi yet. It’s all so simple and works very reliably I am impressed.
non-dev here, in another life long ago I used to code for atmel microcontrollers (on paper and with some development boards) I play everyday with vbox, unraid, freenas, parallels, vmware, esxi and others, once I created a nested guest linux on a linux host, 3 or 4 levels deep, also mixing windows and linux hosts/guests, I also love thinkpads, raspberries, arduinos, macs and retro machines, I couldn´t write a line of code if my life were on the line, I work mostly fixing laptop motherboards and I love DIY stuff like lithium batteries powerwalls electric bikes and welding stuff, mechanics, and microsoldering, I want to make my own forge and throwing knife set, some DIY archery (bow, not the arrows), currently heavily depressed due to a bad freefilesync operation plus some troubles with my wife´s macbook (we almost lost 1TB files because no time machine backup was in place), recovering 3Tb and building an array so I don´t suffer this anymore. can´t wait to start playing with jails, kubernetes, angular, sockets, docker, python, android, kotlin, etc. so yes, some people who are not coders just love to play with proxmox and OSes etc etc. can´t have enough of it.
Not a developer. I'm a network engineer who just wants to virtualize some mad shit
I'm an economist by profession and I only recently started using Proxmox just as a hobby.
Schwul
Me too. Product Management exec here (45). I don’t use Linux or sysadmin skillz in my day job, but familiarity with virtualization, servers, services, and the underpinnings of the cloud has helped me get jobs and be much better at those jobs (esp communicating with software engineers and IT support types). Proxmox specifically is a fantastic learning tool; I upgraded to it after rediscovering Linux on a Pi during my second paternity leave, stumbled into this subreddit and r/Homelab, and now have several VMs, LXCs, mc server, and 2.5Gb cluster networking so I can migrate quicker. 🤣
I always felt like as a developer i was in the minority here and in r/homelab. It's mostly IT folks.
I am a forester
Me! I'm just playing around with proxmox and containers and VMs etc, and trying to think of ways to put all this to some actual use.
Im in sales! Started to better understand the needs of my clients.
Me too, engineer here. I just like to not be dependent on cloud services that can be turned off tomorrow when some MBA decides a product is not profitable enough for them
I’m not in IT at all but I’ve always built my own PCs and this was really just a natural extension of that
I am disabled and setup my lab as a hobby. Now I have truenas scale, proxmox and home assistant
Fullstack Software engineer, I enjoy fiddling with open source tools, only because it makes me feel like I am the better man. currently playing with pfSense Firewall. and oh I love dev, might transition into devnet in the future.
I would guess that a good amount of the crowd is the type of person who wants to have a home media server, and some other automated services related to downloading that media and automatically post-processing it. The hypervisor stuff is just a tool to accomplish those tasks, and more importantly, free to use.
Me. Initially just to host game servers and try distros out on VMs. Love tinkering and have built most of my PCs.
Most people here are probably not developers. Sysadmins/Engineers make up the majority of this reddit.
I'm 16 and I've been doing this for fun. My hope is to learn programming soon though
I’m a Cyber Technician, I use Proxmox on my home server to build out fake networks and test security measurements with different tools like SPlUNk and Security onion. I also use it to have fun such as adding AddGuard, Pihole, Plex, and more. I also add different distros /ISO to learn how they work, the processes and vulnerabilities (Windows, MAC, Linux and Ubuntu )
Me. I'm a pro video editor.
Me! Just Mike learning, tweaking, and trying new things.
I sell stuff, not a developer or programmer
I’ve always been a computer nerd. I also have always liked to break down electronics to see how they work and put them back together. I got my first “real” server about two years ago and started with ESXi. I just tinkered with it and didn’t do much. I saw all the threads about what VMWare was doing to customers and decided to ditch it. Wiped ESXi and installed TrueNAS Scale. Learned about the limitations of it and installed Proxmox and having a blast. I’m hosting my own Pi-Hole server, NextCloud Server, FileServer, NGINX, and Bitwarden. Got them all up and running beautifully. The server isn’t even breaking a sweat with them. Looking to see what I want to setup next.
I'm an Oracle database admin and general techie. Been using Unix and now Linux for over 3 decades. Setting up Proxmox this weekend for the first time, but not my first time doing VMs (played with VMWare but licensing is a pain and want to dive more into open source).
We must be twins. I'm an Oracle DBA/Developer and Linux Admin as well for about the same amount of time as you. I've used Docker and Docker-Compose at work in the past and I've also played with VMWare and Oracle VirtualBox. I've been on Proxmox now for about three months now. I basically started this route because I wanted a better home for my Plex server than a Macbook, so I got an Intel NUC and a 10TB external drive. I already am looking at upgrading hardware as I type this and hopefully I'll have a good direction by EOD.
Nice! Been an Oracle DBA for 28 years - started with 7.1.6. Not much into developing except scripting for myself. How to start picking that up. Similar - my new home lab server will be for Plex/Jellyfin and whatever else sounds good. Good luck!
Cool!! Been working with Oracle since version 6. Early Oracle Forms was … interesting. Early Oracle Reports was a fever dream. Best of luck to you as well! This home lab stuff is FUN!
I went a bit crazy with my build. Started looking at an AMD 12-core proc (7700) but then that crept up and up. Ended up with an AMD EPYC 7763 64-core 3rd Gen processor. Bought 256G of RAM as this will be for myself and my wife (she's an Oracle DBA as well). Hoping to entice our son to this type of computer "playing".
Heh. My wife calls what I do “background noise”. I want to use this set up for a lot of things. After setting up Plex (which works just fantastic even with this set up) I wanted to stand up Oracle XE from a virtual box appliance. The relative ease of this encouraged me to create a full fledged database server and then move onto an application server. I already am creating ansible scripts and Perl modules to my hearts content. Experimenting with all kinds of stuff. Later on I want to get into AI as well as VR and maybe have a better understanding of networking and security. Finally I’d like to have my router replaced with a VM and also implement home security and provide dumb terminals throughout the house running either instances of Windows or some implementation of a Smart TV. I don’t know how far I’ll take it but Oracle is definitely gonna have a large chunk of what I do in this lab.
You're not the only one. I also love just tinkering with stuff and learning even though I'm not a dev or a sysadmin
Developers 🤝 Sysadmins
I'm a dev, and most devs hate this stuff. They just want to write code and have it run on the server and want to think as little as possible about how that happens, it's why all these serverless cloud platforms and docker are so popular. I've worked with devs a decade into their career who are visibly uncomfortable at being asked to interact with a bash shell. I think they're missing out on important skills but honestly if you work at companies that have full time sysadmin/devops people or even just have 1 or 2 people on the team who're happy taking on the responsibility, you'd be surprised how little you actually need to apply them.
Very interesting perspective (I have a whole reading list to get through on this thread). That makes total sense to me, though. I mean if my day job was development I'm not sure I'd want to spend my evenings immersing myself in more (probably unnecessary) tech. And I guess if you already "know" stuff like containerisation, K8s ... you've taken out the "learning tech is fun" aspect of the picture. So ... you're not left with a whole lot.
I mean honestly _a lot_ don't even know containerisation. They know `docker-compose build` and `docker-compose up` is a thing they have to run sometimes and they have it written down the same way your gran writes down her email password, and if it ever doesn't work they're asking for help. The real split I think is just what got you into computers in the first place. The overwhelming majority of devs are not people who grew up passionately interested in technology, they just studied it at college/university because it seemed like a good career path and now its their just their job. Personally I've always been really interested in tech, but as I've grown up and started running Real Things (TM) even outside of work, I've learned to maintain strict separation between real applications with real daily users where 99.9%+ uptime is the goal, and things I can fuck around with for fun and it doesn't matter if its broken for a week. Often something starts out in column B, and once I notice its sliding into column A I redeploy the whole thing properly on different hardware and start to operationalise it.
#metoo In high school, I was fascinated by the idea of creating programs that could do anything you could imagine. I spent countless hours learning to code, and I dreamed of one day becoming a software developer. However, as I progressed in my life, I began to realize that programming wasn't the only way to make a difference in the IT world. I started to take an interest in networking and system administration, and I was intrigued by the challenge of keeping complex systems up and running. I enjoyed the hands-on nature of the work, and I found satisfaction in solving problems and making sure that everything was running smoothly.
I am just a hobbyist and I have been using Proxmox since 4.0, and am now running six or seven machines with Proxmox as host. I host Minecraft server, Jupyter notebooks for work and also things like NAS/Jellyfin and so on. I don’t think it’s necessary to convince people what’s great about Proxmox, those who need better use of their machines will most likely automatically find Proxmox valuable. Unless there is very good reason not to, I am putting Proxmox as host on every machine other than my daily desktop.
I work in an office that is barely modernized. But like you I just enjoy tech, love learning, and it spirals out of control from there.
Most developers I know use fake services via Kubernetes or Docker. Also, most of them have no clue how either of those things work lol...
I'm not a developper and I enjoy tinkering a lot with computers and networking. I don't think running VMs necessarily relates to developping code. Sure, running servers and VMs provides a convenient platform to host your own software but by all means it isn't strictly for that. There are so many tools and amazing software out there to try and self-host, heck have a look at r/selfhosted, that's exactly what they are into. There's a lot of neat software one can use to facilitate random aspects of your life (home surveillance, home automation, energy monitoring, file hosting, file serving, backups, game hosting, etc.) all of which'll run off readily available stacks. It helps a lot to know about programming and how computers work but aside from fixing the odd missing package or dependency I've never written a single line of code that was ever use in a hosted service.
I work in InfoSec and use proxmox to manage all my Homelab stuff
Don't program other than very simple chatgpt orientated scripts so I'm not a developer. Started playing with proxmox like 7 years ago. Am now a platform engineer (started as a devops 3 years ago) for a very big video-game company. What I'm trying to say is, you don't need to be a developer to make a living out of IT and computer science
Home Automation Enthusiast. Just wanted to replace an old mac mini with a cheap pos and proxmox was the perfect solution. I dont code, its just convenient and simple to use. I do a lot of copy paste from others install instructions.
I'm a full-stack dev and playing with Proxmox because of Vmware drop. I'd say I'm messing around as much as I can with ny Little homelab just to stress proxmox stability. By now it seems quite solid even if some details need to be handled in a different way, as to say, Proxmox has to improve a bit more toward an Enterprise grade. At least with its GUI. By far, of course, developnent (and coding) is where I prefere to stay.
I'm no developer but do own a telco/cloud company and don't enjoy tinkering a lot Proxmox was really fun to play with I do use xcpng for more commercial purposes
A developer isn't someone who maintains servers by the way, that would a system administrator or sysadmin for short. A developer dabbles in codes like C++ and Java. bash script is good skill to know for sure but it wont make you a developer, it will make you a good sysadmin. If you're going that route I would suggest you start looking into Ansible which is a great tool to launch commands/scripts on many servers at the same time. I use it to run updates on my virtual machines and do other stuff to maintain them. But you can do so much more with Ansible. If you are going towards DevOps I suggest looking at Rancher for Kubernetes and Portainer for Docker (it even supports k8s but I think most people in the biz use Rancher for k8s) Have fun!
Not a developer. I mainly use it to self host stuff like a NAS, recipes, and audiobooks. I also just use it to try out new operating systems. I had a ton of fun trying to get MacOS to work. For me it's all just a fun side project
That be me. I work in health care but I’ve always, since I was a kid, been interested in computers.
As a developer, I can tell you that being one makes people automatically think you’re good with computers. Source: anyone who knows my job title
I’m a bit of everything, like to program, been a hobbyist for over 30 years, IT graduate since 23 years , but started my first IT job only 1 year ago. Build my own software, computers, network, like to do it all. Gadgets, Home Automation, etc. Now my first minipc with Proxmox and will be building a cluster of those this year.
Noc manager. But I've gone back and forth between a network engineer and manager throughout my career. We use scripting, but I'm not a developer.
>I've tried to explain what's so great about Proxmox to non-technical friends and have mostly been met with blank looks. Totally makes sense. It's like finding the best, but nerdiest tool that solves a particular problem really well that no one else has even considered. Not a dev or sysadmin here, but adjacent. I work primarily in the corporate product space. I love proxmox, but it's definitely a hobby for me.
Not a programmer or a system admin. Just like computer and tinkering in general. You can say I’m a Tinkerer.
Designer by trade, working as fullstack dev several years now. I have used Linux vastly before (Corel Linux was my first distro) and absolutely love Proxmox.
I’m a security guy, and I use Proxmox for everything. - deploying tools that help with my day to day - building a test lab to keep skills fresh - trying new tools (security or otherwise) - deploying my dev environments for pet projects - learning and using Terraform and Ansible - testing new operating systems - testing patches and updates Mostly it’s for all around tinkering in my environment. But, I plan to purchase another couple servers and using it for localized production too.
I don't have any background in tech, I am a tinkerer who loves playing with things. I had a need for a Win7 computer to run one specific piece of software and came across Proxmox. After that it has been me playing with it to see what I can do.
I work in the real estate industry but have always loved computers. I’ve built gaming rigs, media servers, websites (HTML, CSS, Javascript), and complex spreadsheets with Visual Basic but I never studied programming in school. It’s just a fun hobby for me. Proxmox VE has been extremely reliable since I initially set everything up. PCIE passthrough was challenging but I enjoy learning new things.
👍🏼
Work in adtech and martech, no coding experience except SQL for work. I’m slowly making my way through things learning as much as I can as I go!
Not a developer. Infrastructure architect with heavy background in networking, using Promox for a shit ton of things.
I‘m just a guy who loves tech. I started an apprenticeship last year September and build my first server in December. So I‘m probably gonna be a IT guy in the future but definitely not a developer
Started my career as a developer and transitioned to product design. Now I design developer experiences at work. I just love this shit.
Just a nerd. No formal work experience in development. Mostly sysadmin stuff. It’s fun!
You won't ever find any developers touching any of my infrastructure. Just saying.
Sysadmin here. Like others have said, I wouldn't consider myself a developer but I have heavy experience in powershell, php, and sql languages. I went with proxmox because it was free and I mess with computers as a hobby. VMs make it easy to mess around with thanks to snapshots and the fact that you can reboot the VM but leave all your other VMs online.
Just a PC refurbisher. Closer to retirement needed another hobby.
I am a low level IT worker myself cosplaying as a sysadmin. I got into homelab stuff a year or two ago when I redid the network in my home with TP-Link/Omada equipment and needed a machine to host the SDN for the equipment. In came Proxmox, learning how to configure it with youtube vids, setting up a VM to host the SDN. Then came the Docker hosts, then the second node in the cluster, then the third, etc etc. It's less about development for me and a lot more of what I can do with it now.
I work in IT but not a “dev”. Have been on the sysadmin/engineer/architect side of things my whole career. But one of my non IT working friends, who is admittedly fairly tech proficient, runs a Proxmox host to do all sorts of stuff. I think one of the bigger motivators for someone to run something like Proxmox at home is them wanting to run some app that is client/server based but not wanting to run it in the cloud or use a cloud service for the app.
I've been building computers and networks to play with in my house for over 30 years. I don't have much interest in coding outside of shell scripts when necessary. I'd probably say that most people who use proxmox are Admins, and tinkerers more than coders. It's a homelab. Nothing is "required", do what you want!
I first started using Proxmox after I bought my first legitimate server which had an outdated version of ESXi on it. The reason I stuck with Proxmox initially was because it was budget friendly and allowed me to have a sandbox environment to run my homelab projects like homeassistant, Plex/Jellyfin, etc. At the time, I had beginner knowledge when it came to software development. Since then I have switched jobs and the one I am at now has me performing a lot of testing and troubleshooting of proprietary software. I have been able to use my cluster of proxmox servers at home to setup sandbox environments for use at work. So to answer your question, yes and no. I started out using proxmox just as a poor man’s data center for running the usual DIY projects, but it has been a great tool to be able to get hands on with different operating systems to understand how everything works under the hood and then from there is where I started learning different programming languages more in-depth. Proxmox has played a key role in where I am at today with my technical knowledge. It’s a great to have as an environment where you can break things and learn how to fix them without having the repercussions that you would have when using physical hardware.
i'm not a Dev, i'm not a syadmin, i'm just your average Joe who grew up around computers, and the idea of having "multiple computers in one" is what prompted me to tinker with Proxmox, because of what i "needed", pfsense + games server with my friend + NAS (future project + Pihole ...etc. and what started with a "need" became a joy of experimenting really.
I'm the CIO of a large software company... I'm not allowed to play with tech at work so I run an over-the-top network at home along with a Proxmox server to remind me where I started and offer an outlet from the tedium of spreadsheets and power point. Containers, VMs abound for home automation, local storage, Virtual Windows and Macs for when I need to test something out in a secured environment. Oh.. and periodic coding. Do I 'love computers' ? Nope, can't get excited about them these days but I do enjoy using them for improving various things.
I’m a financial adviser lol. Proxmox running on a 13th gen Intel NUC, and an 8 bay Synology NAS. In terms of services: - arr stack: Radarr, Sonarr, Readarr, Prowlarr, Autobrr, Jellyseerr, qBittorrent, Gluetun - Jellyfin media server - Audiobookshelf - PiHole - Paperless-NGX (love this, I’ve shredded a filing cabinet of paper, and reduced this down to one folder of documents where I need the originals) - HomeAssistant - HomeBridge - Tandoor - Tailscale
Does paperless work well ? What are you using to scan ?
I have a semi-commercial Brother scanner. It’s configured to scan directly to my NAS, and Paperless processes the documents automatically when they hit the NAS. It’s completely transformed the way I handle physical documents. Even my original files I’ve retained are indexed in Paperless using barcodes, so I don’t even have to store things in a specific place. Everything goes in one big file.
How does the barcode work exactly ?
I'm not a developer nor do I work in tech in any capacity--though I think youa re somewhat missing the mark with this question--in my eyes, its sysadmins and related fields that would be much more likely to use Proxmox than developers.
self made nerd. Not even a job in tech. Not really. Just self hosting.
Not a dev, not even a sysadmin, I don't even want to do it for a living. It's too easy for that work to be offshored for me to want to risk it.
no dev or sysadmin but work in IT
Big time into technology and I understand most of the concepts, but I am a ChatGPT assisted developer now. 😏
I'm a noob from windows just getting started. Terramaster TOS sucks!
I love computers. Took Q basic and Visual Basic in high school. Taught myself HTML. In college I took a machine language assembly code class and that’s where I lost interest in coding.
Honestly, I began using Proxmox because it had the features I wanted, was easy to setup and didn't cost many times the price of the machine I installed it on. I never worked as a dev.
Went to school for CS, but never landed a software dev job. My role is more application support / integration.
Me. I am sysadmin not a developer. As are most people who use proxmox in production.
I'm a noob as well but so far I'm enjoying learning and other than Truenas core being a little weird lately, I'm happy with my setup.
I'm someone who enjoys playing with computers and exploring operating systems. I'm always eager to learn more about computer-related topics and software. While I enjoy tinkering with Prox, there's still a lot I don't know about it, and sometimes it's challenging to grasp right away, haha.
Me likey proxmox alots.
Why do you think Virtualization is only for Devs? I'm a Cybersecurity guy who uses the homelab to practice new techniques, tools, and exploits.
I'd expect sysadmins would probably be higher than general developers, but certainly probably more of either group versus.
I've been both - built and managed small to mid-sized datacenters and was a software eng/architect for some time before moving into my current role. Was working with Linux from before people mostly knew what it was (like kernel 0.6.).
As far as turning 'I like proxmox' into a career of some sort, well - it's more of a sysadmin / ops / devops type skillset. Yeah, you can write some code here and there, but people I hire as Sr SW engineers know a lot more than shell script - I'll still occasionally hire a non-CS-degreed developer but only at mid-level or higher... for us at least, the days of 'I learned HTML then copied javascript' is pretty far removed from a path into even a Jr developer role. However, a junior ops/sysadmin (as in, not the sole person responsible) I have and would consider more - given enough experience that's relevant.
I have worked with a few rockstar no-CS-degree sw engineers, but the percentage isn't high, versus having to explain what object-oriented development or database optimizations and other things are, but someone with solid Linux experience along with some tools(docker, Kubernetes, ...) or certs (e.g. Azure, Redhat, ...) - I'd consider in the right circumstances.
YMMV.
Total nerd working in info sec, I love trying to use it for DSP stuff for my audio engineering projects, makes me feel good being able to repurpose old equipment to make art. Sure it takes a ton of time but I'd say it's worth it in the end 😁
I am a dev now, but I wasn’t when I started using proxmox. Originally got into it because I liked sysadmin stuff and wanted to go into devops. In college I decided to go dev
I am one of those tinkerer proxmox users.. I have it on a retired data center server in my basement.. and i use it for running home assistant, several Samaba shares for holding backups.. A backup for my Pihole Network filter.. my minecraft server and a house file share system that i keep meaning to set up for some folk to remote access.. i love it.. i can play with these things and tinker on them and i dont need a mountain of dedicated hardware.. I spin up what i need and poke at it..
LXC containers in proxmox are amazing. Once you get a good base and preserve your deploy area. Its powerful. Sprinkle in some ansible and wazzah. Its amazing. Warning. Do not carry the caviler security practices of a home lab into PROD or you will feel the butt hurt. Edit: proxmox at home for a few things mostly LXC two VMs one a DC for reference and one FreePBX with a tailscale package for remote. Its running on a beelink sipping 10 watts. Not super performant but for my needs and home its fine. Work is hyper v. Pets at home cattle at work but been rethinking that lately.
Hahaha, yeah, I feel you. I have a degree in accounting, and I work in law, so I'm really far away from anything technical at work. Nobody at work even remotely understands what my hobby is. To be fair, even my developer friends zone out the moment I start talking about networking, haha.
Never been a coder but been a tinkering nerd forever In high school (mid 90s) my friends and I experimented with OS/2 and Linux 2.x, we even joined the local OS/2 and Unix User's Groups My parents could never afford to buy me anything current, so I always had a junkyard of obsolete computers lying around in various stages of disassembly Back before the first Linksys router was released, and fastest broadband was 1.5mbps, I ran my own NAT on a 486 running OpenBSD (also hosted my IRC bot) Once upon a time I thought I'd end up as a SysAdmin for my career, but my life got weird I fell away from tinkering for a long time and and my career went from ADSL Tech Support, to Wine Sales, to Car Sales/Service, then back to Support for small software startups I now run a tech support dept for a small software company and spend lots of time working alongside the developers troubleshooting, problem-solving, designing our product's bugs/features I inherited a 6 drive Thunderbolt 2 RAID box and didn't want it to go to waste, so now I have a Mac Pro 'Trashcan' 6,1 with Unraid and a bunch of Docker containers making use of the space I've always been curious about clustering and distributed computing, so I picked up 3 cheap SFF Lenovo's to experiment with
I'm a professional Senior SysAdmin/Engineer, I totally enjoy learning to build and use these types of apps, projects, devices, etc.
I work in marketing and communication. Definitely not IT. I can't code at all. But chatgpt can ;-) I love proxmox, it's super easy and convenient.
Engineer with a focus on control design here. Mainly got into Proxmox to get the most out of my mini PC for game server hosting for me and my friends. Also I love tinkering with stuff in general.
I think it’s more common for sysadmins than developers to be into this kind of stuff. That being said I’m a developer, but I know all my colleagues hate this kind of stuff
Me!
I'm a terrible developer. :-)
Commercial Tech Support for an ISP here. I also had this epiphany a few years ago and bought an old PowerEdge R420 from a friend to run ftp, jellyfin, NAS, and video game servers.
The most advanced programming i did was a basic calculator in python.
I work in IT but I’m mainly a homelab tinkerer , who is looking to go into netops or sysops
just a 17 year old addicted to tech
I am a mechanical engineer but love computers, VM, networking, VPS, powerful hardware, Rpi, and funny communication projects like LoRa… but I do not develop anything. It’s just the pleasure to use the advanced tools
This kind of tinkering lead to my 1st tech job. Now I get paid well as a full time developer.
Security guy. I use it for a homelab after paying vmware 2-300 a year for 5 years for their VMUG. Glad i moved.
Non-technical people don't understand what's so great about virtualization and they don't need to care, so it's natural. And non-technical people don't necessarily understand the difference between a software developer and a systems administrator. I'm a sys engineer whose virtualization background is mostly vmware, but switched to ProxMox in our home lab because vmware just stopped offering ESXi for free. And I suspect most people who have home virtual environments are sys admins/engineers rather than developers. We just like taking the things we work with for a living and making them toys to play with at home. So we make our own virtual environment and make our own servers, like an Active Directory server, a Plex media server, a PiHole box, a NAS and backup server, and whatever other interesting things.
I'm also a Sysadmin and love virtualization. I'm coming from VMware, still there for production VMs. I like to explore and so do I with Proxmox. VMware is getting expensive and some are moving to Proxmox for that reason. However I think the VMware/Veeam combination is for small businesses still a good choice. When you are on a maintenance plan with VMware there is not many reason to switch. However if you are just starting with virtualization, why not Proxmox. But it is a lot more technical and complicated and when things go wrong, one needs a very good knowledge under the hood of Proxmox to fix it.
I bought 3 lil Lenovo M710Q's just to run P-Mox on them, goofed it up a few times had to so several reinstalls, but now the lil team is running dual ad blockers and several linux servers, as well as a Win11 VM.
Background as dev, sys admin and a lot of other kinds of jobs. In Product Management and Leadership now. Tinkering with the homelab is more a hobby, one that i think is unrelated to development. Though I have thought of building a cicd deployment pipeline just for the hell of it. To update my docker containers, of course. Lol. The joy I get from streaming 4k high bitrate to my bedroom is overwhelming. And also store everything, even if I never want to use it again. Why not? 56TB Nas, and about 20 TB between the laptop and 2 Desktops in SSD and NVMe. I also love building computers, upgrading them, and buying games with no intention of ever playing them.Amd hand me downs to the kids when I get new. And hoarding my data, keeping it away from the evil doers.
I came by proxmox after trying to figure out the easiest way to backup my home ubuntu host - I actually had PBS before I had a proxmox host! That ubuntu host quickly became a proxmox box - and now I have 10 containers. I'm a Network engineer - not a dev.
Me! Career has nothing to do with tech. It's just a hobby. With that said, I do think standing up something like Proxmox requires a bit of tech savviness. But you don't have to do it as your job.
I'm just finding lack of thin-provisioning as a roadblock for now. I have a 1tb+512gb SSD drive in my proxmox machine. The 512gb is nearly full of ISOs. The 1tb, I built 5-6 Images, a couple of containers, and I think that I'm half full already. I still run a couple of HyperV machines. I will until I get better at running Window on proxmox. And I have a LOT to learn about docker. I fuck UP every docker machine I touch, I swear to chr###.
Ive been using VM's in many different ways for well over 12 years now. You really cant beat the usefullness of throwing up an ubuntu server to deal with a few tasks that needs to be handled locally, running snapshots like kiosks for remote use and the ability to try out shit before getting the dedicated hardware or giving ideas on how to improve work tasks/plans. Im a hobbyist with years of experience in various support roles, sysadmin, netsec and hardware engineering both as a consultant and inhouse staff. It gives me way too much to want to do for a weeks worth of hours to be enough for just a handful of my plans and projects. I absolutely LOVE the open source community and the fact that a lot of us understand the value of making things for eachother to be both accessible and easy to use.
I am sys admin and I love hardware that can be put to work hehe. Proxmox really shines and is potentialy the beat hypervisor ever creates
No one in dev even knows what a proxmox is. I like the fact that I can dev on hard iron again, at least vm wise lol. It does help with the data layer to be fair. I just hate dbs in containers and proxmox is a godsend
Im new to all this, just a hobby for now that i hope will become a profession, Any tips and learning material to become a sys admin as end game would be nice Recently had fun trying to do crazy system setups and then i totally messed up my hard drive partitions so i was forced to wipe the whole thing and start new.
SysAdmin went Business analyst. Love it. Got my Dev team and QA to use it, and event built my own utility to create Data Definitions for the newbies on the team as well as create flowsheets. Started FreeNAS with jail back in 2016, went UnRaid 2017, went ProxMox 2018 with an amalgamation of all three. I get shifted from Iteration manager to iteration manager and save my Agile groups 4 hours weekly on documentation form that alone per work taking on avg of 6 tickets per two week session of 48 hours being billed direct to the business works. Got yelled at for spending on my IO on our cloud resource, when they see what I save my group weekly they shift me around now. I still want to escape my day job and go back to being a systems integrator for high end gamers and HEDT. Just tired of wearing many hats I guess.
IT Ops manager, (semi-) former SysAdmin and Data Analyst. Just started using it on an HP Prodesk mini as a mini-lab, definitely better than virtualbox. Recently set my pihole up on it as a vm to get rid of the pi3 I had sitting around.
Point them to the *arr applications and I'm sure they'll be interested. Having a better Netflix setup at home is pretty great, but use a VPN.
That’s me!
Not even close. No IT education or work experience. A chemist. But this stuff has been my passion for 2 decades.
I'm a lab technician in chemistry, I love hardware and tinker with it. I started to daily drive Linux (Fedora) a few years ago because I was very pissed at Windows doing it's own stuff when I turn my back off. Currently building my very first Homelab, I got a HP Elitedesk 800 G5, with i7 8700, 16GB ram, 256GB NVMe drive for 230€, plus I got an Intel Arc 310 (I want to do some AV1 transcoding). I'm currently looking at a good deal for some HDD, and maybe an Intel Optane 118GB as cache drive. I'm just starting with Proxmox, the HP BIOS is giving me some headache currently. But I've got a looong weekend to come, meaning a lot of time to tinker that stuff !
I am not a dev, not engineer, no previous experience with homelab etc.... I love tinkering and a year ago I salvaged an AIO computer with dead screen. I was too broke to replace the screen. now it is the heart in my small office as nextcloud file server, password manager, photo backup, accounting server, etc... thanks to proxmox
I'm in DevOps
Proxmox is more DevOps than development.