Introduction to Proxmox 9: What's New and Why Virtualize Your Projects?

Proxmox 9 was recently released and brings in a lot of features that might cater to the advanced. However, with this new release, they bring an end to one of my biggest complaints to Proxmox: the mobile UI - it simply sucked: both the mobile web and mobile app. The latter sees no improvement but the former has seen a lot of improvements, all of which combined warrant a fresh look at the product.

This presentation will go over the following topics:

• My journey with Proxmox - I went from being completely pro-baremetal to pro-virtualisation in the span of 2 years where many things increasingly convinced me that the latter approach suits a simultaneous project work-style far better. Even kubernetes recommends running “workers” as VMs!

• What’s new with Proxmox 9 - ZFS improvements, new HA and SDN sauce, VM snapshots on thick-LVM on iSCSI drives

• SImple ways to get started with Proxmox as a complete noob - Often the easiest way is to start small. All the usual switch-to-Linux rules apply: use a spare laptop, spare PC, dual boot, etc.

• Usecases - Homelab, Enterprise

• How virtualising your projects gives you infinite flexibility in terms of undo → redo → experiment, all while running actual production services - be it off of a minipc on top of a fridge or a rack full of AMD EPYC servers in a Datacenter in Gurgaon. 

Familiarity with Proxmox, especially 9.0.

Head-start to self-hosting services with the ability to make infinite mistakes and then recover with no trouble. All of this is on a separate host so no interference with the personal/work machine.

Head-start to concepts like virtualisation, high-availability, HA groups, fencing, shared-storage: all of which obviously makes sense in an enterprise setup but might also make sense in a homelab depending on how seriously the audience takes their setup.