Proxmox Homelab

The proving ground

A multi-node Proxmox VE cluster running dozens of self-hosted services, behind Nginx and reachable over Tailscale. It has been running since 2020.

Its real function is not the services. It is that almost everything I have put into production at work was broken here first, on hardware I own, where the failure costs nothing but an evening.

What it runs

• Proxmox VE across multiple nodes, mixing full VMs and LXC containers depending on what the workload actually needs
• Docker for the service tier
• Nginx as reverse proxy
• Tailscale for access, so nothing needs to be published to the open internet to be reachable

Why it earns its keep

Three specific things moved from here into production:

Container and VM boundaries. Learning where LXC is sufficient and where a full VM is the honest answer is much cheaper to learn on your own cluster than during a migration.

Reverse proxy and TLS termination. The Nginx patterns now in front of the Budget application stack were worked out here first.

Network segmentation. Running genuinely untrusted workloads next to things I care about, on one set of hardware, is a useful forcing function. The same instinct shows up in the VLAN segmentation at work and on the yacht builds.

It is also where the security tooling gets evaluated before it goes anywhere near a cardholder data environment. Reading a vendor comparison tells you what a tool claims. Running it for a month tells you what it costs to operate.