Infrastructure Series · start here
Proxmox Homelab
The cluster-first build, start to finish. Written while running one — three nodes, fourteen containers, and the mistakes that came with getting there.
What's in it
- Around 131 pages across 11 chapters.
- Proxmox clustering, and LXC containers as the unit of deployment.
- Traefik as the single ingress, with TLS for internal routes.
- Grafana, Prometheus and Loki for monitoring and logs.
- PBS and Restic for backups — including restoring from them.
- Security hardening applied at the host and service level.
- Ansible for the parts worth automating.
- Storage: ZFS, Ceph and LVM-Thin, and the tradeoffs between choosing each.
What it is not
- Not an enterprise Proxmox manual. It is one opinionated build, not a survey of every option.
- Not a certification guide, and not affiliated with Proxmox or any vendor.
- Not video. It is a written guide you work through.
- Not a substitute for the docs. Proxmox's own documentation is good; this is the path through it that worked.
You do not need the guide to use the configurations. The Ansible roles are MIT on GitHub and complete on their own.
The guide is the reasoning around them — why the cluster is shaped this way, and what broke on the way there.
Inspect it before you buy
The roles that run this cluster are public and MIT licensed — node_exporter, AdGuard and Traefik, version-gated and idempotent. Read them, run them, and decide whether the write-up is worth anything to you.
Going further
Six focused add-on guides extend this build — Traefik and TLS, LXC deployment patterns, PBS backups, Ansible, the monitoring stack, and Wazuh. Proxmox Add-On Guide Line — Complete Bundle collects all six.
If the lab is for a job search
The lab is half of it.
A homelab gets you something to talk about; the interview is a separate skill. Homelab + SOC Career Pack pairs this guide with the SOC Analyst Interview Kit for people doing both — or start with the free cheat sheet and see whether the SOC track is for you.