Proxmox update

I’m really liking Proxmox. A Type 1 Hypervisor installed on a Beelink mini-pc (Ryzen 9; 32GB DDR5 RAM; 1TB on an M.2). The 32 Gigs of RAM is going to be upgraded to 96GB this week.

First thing I installed was Debian 12 desktop because, well, just because. I think all home labs need Debian 12 installed somewhere. I also created a VM running Linux Mint 22, the latest version that just came out. All my production computers and laptops run Mint 21.3. In the past I would just upgrade when a new version becomes available. Now I can install it on a virtual machine (VM) to first try it out.

Then I installed Windows 10 (please don’t sneer). I use it to run remote desktop to get into my work computer via a VPN. I got it set up so I can’t tell the difference between working from home or from work, except that at home I’m working in my underpants, which they won’t let me do at work.

Running virtual machines is the future I think. On a home scale, I can buy cheap thin clients for one or two hundred dollars a pop compared to fifteen hundred for a new desktop that I have to build myself. Thin clients are pretty good computers in their own right, but very inexpensive. They can be used to launch a VM running on a powerful server for no extra money. Heck, my laptops are old dual core machines that when running a VM from them they become powerful laptops giving them new life. From a costs standpoint I can run cheap hardware and still gain the benefit of running high-end software. So long as the Proxmox server is beefy.

What’s funny is the Proxmox server wasn’t all that expensive. A third of the price of a desktop or laptop. And it will run all the operating systems of all my other computers without even sweating. What if I take the laptop (or any device for that matter) away from my home network you ask? I set up a Twingate tunnel on my devices back to my home network as if I’m working from home. Twingate is like a VPN, but better… a VPN on steroids. But any VPN will work if you already have one set up.

I think VM’s will be the future on a larger scale. When buying a computer, say at Best Buy, you’ll be buying a small computer that will just be used to access a VM somewhere. All your apps and data will be on a cloud, and most people will think it will be local to their computer, but it really isn’t.

Microsoft is already driving towards that end. They’re making it harder and harder to let you keep your data local to your computer by pushing people towards their cloud storage. Heck, creating an account for my new VM was a pain to keep things local. During installation it tried to trick me into creating my account on their cloud system. I had to disable the internet on the VM to force it to create my account local to my computer (VM).

Using Linux for seven years made me realize that Windows and Microsoft, for the most part, sucks. If it wasn’t for work I’d never use it.