I did not run OPNSense, but I have a direct comparison for pfSense as VM on Proxmox VE vs pfSense on a ~400€ official pfSense physical appliance.

I do not feel any internet-speed or LAN-speed differences in the 2 setups, I did not measure it though. The change VM -> physical appliance was not planned.

Running a VM-firewall just got tiring fast, as I realized that Proxmox VE needs a lot more reboot-updates than pfsense does. And every time you reboot your pfSense-VM-Hypervisor, your internet’s gone for a short time. Yes, you’re not forced to reboot. I like to do it anyway, if it’s been advised by the people creating the software I use.

Though I gotta say, the pfSense webinterface is actually really snappy and fast when running on an x86 VM. Now that I have a Netgate 2100 physical pfSense appliance, the webinterface takes a looooong time to respond in comparison.

I guess the most important thing is to test it for yourself and to always keep an easy migration-path open, like exporting firewall-settings to a file so you can migrate easily, if the need arises.

[EDIT] - Like others, I also would advice heavily against using the the same hypervisor for your firewall and other VMs. Bare-Metal is the most “uncomplicated” in terms of extra workload just to have your firewall up and running, but if you want to virtualize your firewall, put that VM on its own hypervisor.

Sadly, it seems I cannot replace the disks one-by-one. At least not if I don’t upgrade the SSD size to greater than 4TB at the same time.

The consumer 4TB SSDs yield 3,64 TiB, whereas the datacenter 4TB SSDs seem to yield 3,49 TiB. As far as I know, one cannot replace a zfs raid z1 drive with a smaller one. I’ll have to watch the current consumer SSDs closely and be prepared for when I’ll have to switch them.

I’m not all too sure about buying used IT / stuff in general from ebay, but I’ll have a look, thanks!

Thank you very much for your input, I’ll definitely have to go with business drives whenever the current ones die.

Thankfully, I do have monitoring for SMART data and drive health, so I’ll be warned before something bad happens.

Thank you very much for your input. I’ll definitely have to go for the business models whenever the current ones die.

I knew I would make some mistake and learn something new, with this being my first real server-PC (instead of mini-pc or raspberry pi) and RAID. I just wished it wasn’t that pricey of a mistake :(

Yeah, I guess I should’ve put like +50% more money into it and gotten some Enterprise SSDs instead. Well, what’s done is done now.

I’ll try replacing the disks with enterprise SSDs when they die, which will probably happen fast, seeing as the wearout is already at 1% after 1 month of low usage.

What do you think about Samsung OEM Datacenter SSD PM893 3,84 TB?

Thanks for taking the time to answer!

So I just looked it up: According to Proxmox VE “disks” interface, my SATA SSD drives have 1% wearout after ~1 month of low usage. That seems pretty horrible.

I guess I’m going to wait until they die and buy enterprise SSDs as a replacement.

I’m definitely not going to use HDDs, as the server is in my living room and I’m not going to tolerate constant HDD sounds.

[EDIT] I don’t even have a cluster, it’s just a single Proxmox VE on a single server using ZFS and it’s still writing itself to death.

[EDIT2] What do you think about Samsung OEM Datacenter SSD PM893 3,84 TB?

Thanks for your input!

If you don’t want to have any freedom until you have it all, you’ll be slave forever.

You’re letting perfect get in the way of good enough.

I don’t know about tailscale, but it seems pihole has got you covered with local DNS, if you’re willing to set the local DNS records manually.

I use pihole as selfhosted DNS server for all my servers and clients. I don’t have many local DNS records (only 2), so if you handle a great amount of ever-changing DNS records, this might not be for you.

Es hört sich schon irgendwie sehr viel an. Aber man kann sich alles ziemlich hoch und teuer konfigurieren, auch wenn es halbwegs günstig startet.

Bei Hetzner kann ich mir auch einen echten Server mieten für 960 € im Monat mit Standort Deutschland

• physische Hardware in einem Rechenzentrum
• AMD EPYC 9454P 48 Core / 96 Threads
• 640 GB DDR5 ECC RAM
• 2x ~4 TB NVME Disks
• 6x ~8 TB NVME Disks

Da zahlst halt auch den Hardware-Support von wegen Teile austauschen wenn notwendig etc.

To me it seems like:

• you want to do a lot of stuff yourself on arch
• but there’s quite some complicated stuff to learn and try

I’d try Proxmox VE and, if you’re also searching for a Backup Server, Proxmox Backup Server.

I recommend these because:

• Proxmox VE is a Hypervisor, you can just spin up Arch Linux VMs for every task you need
• Proxmox VE, as well as Proxmox BS are open source
• you can buy a license for “stable updates” (you get the same updates, but delayed, to fix problems before they get to you)
• includes snapshots, re-rolls, full-backups, a firewall (which you can turn on or off for every VM), …

I personally run a Proxmox VE + Proxmox BS setup in 3 companies + my own homelab.

It’s not magic, Proxmox VE is literally Debian 13 + qemu + kvm with a nice webui. So you know the tech is proven, it’s just now you also get an easy to use interface instead of virsh console commands or virt-manager.

I personally like a stable infrastructure to test and run my important and experimental tuff upon. That’s why I’m going with this instead of managing even the hypervisor myself with Arch.

Thank you very much. I sent this to my coworker who expressed interest in switching to vim :)

It seems nobody really tested 11 to 13, or maybe any kind of major-version-skipping and you won’t find direct experiences here.

Your best bet is to follow the official procedure, so 11 -> 12 -> 13. I’ll leave you with the official upgrade guide for 11 to 12 and 12 to 13.

It seems longer than it is, as not every step is actually required for every system. When upgrading VMs, a snapshot pre-upgrade can also help you skip backup-steps in the guides.

Sadly, that did not solve my problems either.

There’s still no voice output except for the first sentence of all of the navigation apps and when I test the voice navigation with osmand development plugin.

GLaDOS voice is working though, just not when navigating. So, when you actually need it.

Uh yeah, GLaDOS voice! I’ll try SherpaTTS tomorrow.

I’ll report back tomorrow, thank you very much!

Sadly, I’m back to square one now.

I am able to hear he first sentence and that’s it :(

Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE, Hypervisor), my beloved. Especially in combination with Proxmox Backup Server (PBS).

My homelab would not exist without Proxmox VE, as I’m definitely not going to use Nutanix or VMWare. I love working with linux and Proxmox VE is literally debian with a modified kernel and a Management Webinterface on top.

I first learned about Proxmox VE in my company, while we still had VMWare for us and all of our customers. We gradually switched everyone over to Proxmox VE and now I’m using it at home too. Proxmox is an Austrian (my country) company, so I was double hyped about this software.

A few things I like most about Proxmox VE

• Ease of access to the correct part of the documentation you currently need (*)
• Open Source
• Company resides in my country (no US big tech walled garden)
• Linux / Debian based, so no learning new OS’s and toolchains
• Free version available
• Forum available and actually used

(*) What I mean by ease of access to the correct part of the documentation is: Whenever you’re in the WebUI and need to decide on some settings, there’s a button somewhere on the same page which is going to lead you directly to the portion of the documentation you need right now. I don’t know why this seems like such a great luxury, every software should have something like this.

Next steps

My “server” (some mini PC with spare parts I already had) is getting too weak for the workload I put it through, so I’m going to migrate to a better “server”. I already have a PC and most of the necessary parts, I just need some SSDs and an AMD CPU.

Even migrating from PVE (old) -> PVE (new) couldn’t be easier:

• PVE (old): create last backup to PBS, shut down PVE (old)
• PVE (new): add PBS, restore Backups
• ???
• profit

I think it’s great to have a series posting about personal achievements and troubles with selfhosting. There’s so much software out there, you always get to see someone doing something you didn’t even know could be done or using a software you didn’t realize even existed. Sharing is caring.

My only thought is maybe your tts software?

Thank you for your input! I, too, suspect the culprit being RHVoice. I have no proof, though. Yet.

While digging through GrapheneOS’s system settings, I found something which may be of interest. Text-to-speech settings were set to use RHVoice and use system settings for the language. There are 2 sliders to alter speech speed and pitch and there’s a button to test the new settings. Neither could I use the sliders, nor the button, all of them were greyed out.

After setting the spoken language to english (united states), the sliders and button became usable. I did start a test-navigation with Osmand and it now also tells me the first thing I need to do on my drive (turn left in 400m), which it didn’t do before.

Not sure how that setting changes anything of relevance though. RHVoice has no german voice (my system language), but all the navigation apps mentioned above come with their own voices. I’ll test this out tomorrow on my way to work.

Will report back. Thanks again!

Of course you can always build a good PC or server.

I could have done that too, but I wanted my first real homelab-do-it-all-yourself setup to be a little more on the cautiously small side. I didn’t want to have too much noise in my apartment and also didn’t want to stress my electricity-bill and wallet too much, so I opted to build small and reuse what I had lying around.

I already had 2 Mini-PCs and a raspberry pi from earlier experiments with selfhosting. I just bought some disks and RAM. If you don’t have any mini-PCs, they’re relatively cheap in comparison with full PCs. Or you could use some older PC you still have but do not use.

My motto more or less was you can always spend more money and build bigger later

The final Hardware

• Mini-PC: Zotac ZBox CI665 nano
• RAM: 32 GB DDR4 RAM (according to specs, CI665 cannot go beyond 32GB sadly)
• SSD: 1x 2TB Samsung SATA SSD
• external USB HDD (6TB)

What I host on my Proxmox VE

• CheckMK Monitoring
• GitLab Runner
• pihole (network-wide, DNS-based adblocker)
• Nextcloud (production and staging instance for testing new updates before rolling out to production with my data)
• nginx proxy manager
• syncthing server

The 2nd Mini PC (some old intel NUC with 4 cores and 16 GB RAM) + a USB HDD is my Proxmox Backup Server for all this. And what’s really important (my data from nextcloud + some configs) gets backed up to my Hetzner Storage Box with restic.

The raspberry pi is now my WiFi Access Point :)

Conclusion

Homelab doesn’t need to be big or small, it can be whatever you want it to be or whatever you can afford or are willing to have and maintain. From my experience, if you’re not hosting anything CPU-intensive, older or smaller machines will do just fine.

For example, my nextcloud could easily use more resources than the whole Zotac ZBox could house, if there were more users. But as my services are only used by me, most of them are idle most of the time.

Tip at the end about your opsense-VM on Proxmox

I tried letting Proxmox host my pfSense too, but that got old pretty fast. Whenever Proxmox needed a Reboot, my internet was gone too for that time, as the pfSense VM on Proxmox was the gateway to my ISP-modem. In the end, I just bought a real Netgate pfSense appliance.

I’m currently in the process of de-googling and generally removing my reliance on company-services for my digital stuff.

Currently using nextcloud for contacts, calendar, files and photos (via nextcloud memories). It’s not super fancy, but it’s easy to use, understand, setup and it doesn’t require all too much out of your system, etc. My self-hosted nextcloud stuff (+ a few other VMs) all run on the same mini-PC in my living room.

Regarding the coming netxcloud memories app: I just sync the photos to my desktop and laptop via nextcloud desktop app. This is probably only possible because I do not own terabytes of pictures though. If you have a lot of photos and videos, I can understand how syncing would be a bad idea.

I didn’t know photoprism, I’m going to take a look at that for the “curated albums” feature, thanks!