Introduction

For years, VMware ESXi was the foundation of my homelab — stable, dependable, and familiar. Then Broadcom acquired VMware, and the writing was on the wall.

The free ESXi license disappeared. Support for consumer-grade hardware like MiniPCs and NUCs became problematic. The platform that had “just worked” for years was now actively working against the homelab use case.

Enter Proxmox — an open-source virtualization platform built on Debian Linux, offering KVM, LXC, ZFS, and native clustering without a licensing fee.