Building a Proxmox Cluster for Development and Testing

compute
  • proxmox
  • virtualization
  • infrastructure

Running a local Proxmox cluster has been one of the most impactful additions to my homelab. It gives me a dedicated environment for spinning up VMs and containers on demand.

Why Proxmox?

Proxmox VE is a free, open-source virtualization platform based on Debian. It combines KVM for VMs and LXC for containers in a single management interface.

Key Benefits

  • No licensing costs — full-featured hypervisor at zero cost
  • Web UI and API — manage everything from a browser or automate with scripts
  • Clustering — built-in high availability across multiple nodes
  • ZFS support — enterprise-grade storage with snapshots and replication

Cluster Layout

My cluster consists of three nodes:

  1. pve-01 — primary node, 64 GB RAM, Ryzen 7 5700G
  2. pve-02 — secondary node, 32 GB RAM, Ryzen 5 5600G
  3. pve-03 — lightweight node, 16 GB RAM, Intel N100

Each node runs ZFS on mirrored NVMe drives for local storage, with a shared NFS mount for ISOs and backups.

Typical Workloads

# Create a new LXC container for a CI runner
pct create 200 local:vztmpl/debian-12-standard_12.2-1_amd64.tar.zst \
  --hostname ci-runner-01 \
  --memory 4096 \
  --cores 4 \
  --net0 name=eth0,bridge=vmbr0,ip=dhcp

I run a mix of workloads across the cluster:

  • GitLab Runners for CI/CD pipelines
  • MinIO for S3-compatible object storage
  • Postgres and Redis instances for integration testing
  • Development VMs with full desktop environments for manual testing

Lessons Learned

The biggest takeaway from running Proxmox at home is that infrastructure-as-code principles apply just as well in a homelab as they do in the cloud. Automating VM provisioning with Ansible playbooks and Terraform providers has made the whole setup reproducible and easy to maintain.