The Virtualization Network

The Virtualization Network The Virtualization Report presents on all three areas of network virtualization, storage virtualizat

Proxmox has announced 24/7 enterprise support, marking a major shift for organizations evaluating it as a VMware alterna...
03/09/2026

Proxmox has announced 24/7 enterprise support, marking a major shift for organizations evaluating it as a VMware alternative.

Starting October 19, enterprise support will be available around the clock with access to Proxmox enterprise engineers across multiple time zones. The coverage includes Proxmox Virtual Environment, Proxmox Backup Server, and Proxmox Datacenter Manager.

Premium subscribers will receive the new coverage from day one, including unlimited support tickets, a two-hour prioritized response, and SLA backed escalation workflows. Standard customers will gain access in Q4 2026, while Basic support keeps its existing SLA.

Proxmox is also launching Proxmox North America Inc to provide a local presence for customers in the U.S. and Canada. The organization will handle sales, account management, and technical support during business hours across Eastern through Pacific time zones.

How much does direct 24/7 vendor support matter when choosing infrastructure software?

Seven Proxmox decisions can become painful to change later, especially once a lab grows into dozens of virtual machines,...
02/09/2026

Seven Proxmox decisions can become painful to change later, especially once a lab grows into dozens of virtual machines, multiple nodes, backup jobs, and VLANs. Careful planning at the start can save major rework later.

Key areas to think through before building out a Proxmox environment:

Decide whether the host may join a cluster later, and use final hostnames and IP addresses from the start.
Plan the network layout early, including traffic separation, VLAN design, MTU values, and Corosync needs.
Choose where virtual machine storage will live before workloads are moved.
Select CPU types with future migration in mind.
Think about whether hosts need to be interchangeable.
Define what backup means, and where backups will be stored.
Plan where Proxmox depends on external services such as DNS, DHCP, authentication, monitoring, and backup infrastructure.

These choices are much easier when the environment is still small. Which Proxmox decision has been the hardest to change later?

Forgejo is drawing attention as a self-hosted Git server for home labs, with familiar GitHub-like concepts and a feature...
01/09/2026

Forgejo is drawing attention as a self-hosted Git server for home labs, with familiar GitHub-like concepts and a feature set that includes pull requests, issue tracking, Actions, runners, webhooks, package registries, repo mirrors, protected branches, releases, OAuth2, and OIDC.

A Docker Compose setup can bring it online quickly, and the initial configuration wizard covers database type, instance title, repository root, domain, and optional email settings.

Migration support is broad, with built-in options for Git, GitHub, GitLab, Forgejo, Gitea, Gogs, OneDev, GitBucket, Codebase, and Pagure. CI and CD support also stands out, with workflows stored in .forgejo/workflows/ and the ability to run checks, scans, builds, and deployments on hosted runners.

Placing Forgejo behind a trusted reverse proxy is recommended for smoother integration with other tools. What would matter most in your home lab, simpler setup or stronger CI and migration options?

Connecting AI agents to MCP servers can give them far more than access to information, it can give them low-level access...
31/08/2026

Connecting AI agents to MCP servers can give them far more than access to information, it can give them low-level access to infrastructure. That makes security decisions just as important as the integration itself.

Key points to consider:

Read-only access is the safest starting point for tasks like checking VM memory, listing restarted Kubernetes pods, reviewing Docker health checks, and finding old snapshots.

More powerful permissions, such as deleting snapshots or altering resources, should be separated into dedicated accounts, service roles, or profiles.

Filesystem access should stay tightly scoped, since broad paths can expose SSH keys, scripts, configs, credentials, and secrets.

MCP configurations can also become a secrets management issue, especially if API tokens are stored in plain text or committed by accident.

A strong kill switch matters too, including options like disabling profiles, stopping containers, or revoking tokens.

How are AI access controls being handled in your environment?

Self-hosting and being offline are not the same thing, and home lab dependencies can surface fast when the Internet goes...
29/08/2026

Self-hosting and being offline are not the same thing, and home lab dependencies can surface fast when the Internet goes down. DNS, authentication, container images, package repositories, certificates, time sync, monitoring, and backups can all depend on outside services in ways that are easy to miss.

A practical check starts with DNS. Local records, split horizon zones, reverse lookups, and internal aliases should continue working without public DNS support. Authentication also deserves attention, especially when admin access depends on external identity providers.

Other common pressure points include container restarts, package installs, certificate renewals, and time synchronization. Monitoring and backup paths should also be tested with WAN access unavailable so failures do not appear only during recovery.

What dependencies would matter most in a home lab outage?

Keeping a home lab healthy takes more than watching CPU, memory, and disk capacity. Several other metrics can reveal pro...
28/08/2026

Keeping a home lab healthy takes more than watching CPU, memory, and disk capacity. Several other metrics can reveal problems before they turn into outages.

The metrics highlighted include:
Disk latency and I O wait, which can point to storage problems that look like VM or application issues.
SMART and NVMe health, which can show rising errors or retries.
Network errors, drops, retransmissions, latency, and packet loss between critical systems.
Storage pool and filesystem headroom, especially when capacity gets too close to full.
VM, container, and service restart counts, which can signal stability concerns.
Backup age and last successful backup, so recovery points do not grow too old.
Temperature and thermal throttling, especially on mini PCs and NVMe drives.
Container image updates, which help show whether updates are being missed.

These checks can make a home lab easier to manage and more predictable. Which of these metrics gets the most attention in your environment?

Eight home lab workloads are better kept on bare metal instead of inside a virtual layer. The focus is on reducing depen...
27/08/2026

Eight home lab workloads are better kept on bare metal instead of inside a virtual layer. The focus is on reducing dependency chains and keeping critical services separate from the main virtualization stack.

The workloads called out include:

Primary firewall and router.
Main NAS or storage appliance.
Primary backup server.
Dedicated AI or GPU inference server.
NVR or surveillance recording server.
IDS, IPS, or packet capture sensor.
One critical DNS or DHCP service, or both.
Dedicated distributed storage nodes.

The core idea is simple. Some services carry too much dependency risk when they run inside the same environment they protect or support. Hardware separation can make recovery and troubleshooting simpler, especially for services that need to remain available.

Which workloads do you keep on dedicated hardware instead of virtualizing them?

A Proxmox VE boot drive can hold far more than the operating system, but that does not mean it should. Separating key st...
26/08/2026

A Proxmox VE boot drive can hold far more than the operating system, but that does not mean it should. Separating key storage from the boot device can reduce the impact of a drive failure and make recovery simpler.

Seven types of data are best kept off the Proxmox boot drive:

• The only copy of an important virtual machine
• Proxmox backups
• Large ISO libraries
• High-write application data
• Docker persistent data
• Data that is hard to recreate
• More VM storage than the drive can safely handle

The main concern is failure domain. When VMs, backups, and other data share the same drive as the hypervisor, one drive problem can affect everything at once.

A cleaner setup uses separate storage roles for the boot drive, VM storage, ISOs, backups, and other workloads. That makes troubleshooting and recovery easier.

How is Proxmox storage separated in your environment?

DockerWakeUp offers a way to run Docker containers on demand instead of leaving everything running 24,7,365. It sits bet...
25/08/2026

DockerWakeUp offers a way to run Docker containers on demand instead of leaving everything running 24,7,365. It sits between a client and a containerized service, checks whether the target is already up, and starts the Docker Compose project only when traffic arrives.

It also includes idle shutdown behavior. By default, services are checked every five minutes, and containers can be stopped after 3 days of idle time, though that threshold can be changed.

The setup described required Docker, Docker Compose, Node.js, npm, NGINX, Certbot, and jq. A wildcard certificate was issued with Certbot and the Cloudflare DNS plugin, and NGINX SSL configuration had to be added manually in the test setup.

The tradeoff is cold starts. A simple NGINX container started quickly, while a GitLab server took 2 to 3 minutes to come back online.

Would you use on-demand containers for idle services in a home lab?

ARM64 home labs are gaining traction in 2026 as more people look for lower power options and new Proxmox ARM64 support o...
24/08/2026

ARM64 home labs are gaining traction in 2026 as more people look for lower power options and new Proxmox ARM64 support opens the door to more testing. Still, several common mistakes can create avoidable problems when building an ARM64 setup from scratch.

Key pitfalls include:

Assuming software compatibility is automatic. x86 images will not run natively on ARM64 without a matching architecture build.

Treating microSD storage like server storage. Docker logs, databases, package updates, monitoring data, and swap can wear cards out.

Assuming NVMe on ARM is as simple as NVMe in a PC. Cables, HATs, boot order, PCIe settings, and power delivery can all matter.

Other risks include underpowered supplies, missing cooling, expecting ARM virtualization to behave exactly like x86, and moving an entire lab to ARM64 before proving workloads.

A hybrid approach may be the safest path for many home labs. Which ARM64 mistake would you avoid first?

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