The Proxmox-vs-ESXi comparison on this site already covers why so many homelabbers are moving off VMware since the Broadcom licensing changes gutted the free ESXi tier. This one skips the “should I switch” question and gets into the part that actually trips people up: what breaks when you move a real VM from ESXi to Proxmox, and how to get ahead of it instead of debugging a guest that won’t boot at 11pm. ...
Buying the right GPU for your homelab is one decision. Getting Proxmox to actually hand that GPU to a VM or container is a separate one, and it’s where a lot of people get stuck, because Proxmox actually supports two completely different ways to do it, and picking the wrong one for the job means either a fight with IOMMU groups you didn’t need to have, or a container that can’t do what you needed a full GPU for. Here’s what each path actually requires, and how to pick between them. ...
Proxmox hands you two completely different ways to run a workload, LXC containers and full VMs, and the “New CT” and “Create VM” buttons sit right next to each other in the UI like the choice barely matters. It matters. Pick the wrong one for a given workload and you’ll either waste resources you didn’t need to waste, or hit a wall six months in when something a container fundamentally can’t do turns out to be exactly what you needed. Here’s how to actually decide, workload by workload, instead of defaulting to whichever one you set up first. ...