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homelab

Why I don’t use Proxmox (and why CloudStack fits my lab)

Most people reach for Proxmox. I didn’t. This is about how I experiment, not about what’s “best.”

I’m not anti-Proxmox. I just don’t run my lab the way Proxmox wants to be loved. I blow things up for sport: spin up twenty VMs, try a dumb idea, throw it away, repeat. I want to model little clouds inside my homelab, abuse them, then leave no trace by Sunday night.

If you’re new to the names: CloudStack is an IaaS orchestrator—projects, accounts, templates, network offerings, the whole cloud-shaped control plane. Proxmox VE is a fantastic virtualization platform for VMs/containers with an excellent GUI and ecosystem. Those aren’t value judgments, just different center-of-gravity.

CloudStack is meant to replicate a cloud environment (shocker, I know), where Proxmox is better described as an alternative to something like VMWare. Proxmox fills the role of the hypervisor in an enterprise environment where Cloudstack gives me the freedom to have nice little segments that can serve as production, staging, testing, dangerous, or whatever else.

How my lab pushes me away from Proxmox

  • I live and die by ephemeral environments. I want to stamp out a little VPC-ish bubble, attach a template, and nuke it cleanly. Proxmox can absolutely clone templates and has an API, but the mental model is “hosts + VMs (+ containers),” not “projects + networks + offerings.” That gap is where my friction shows up.

  • I want to be able to drop down a VPC, stuff a few VMs in there, try out the software or run my experiment and the wash my hands of it completely. This is the type of workflow that CloudStack is designed for. If this were YouTube, inevitably the top comment would read something like "I literally do all of this on Proxmox 3 times a day, you're just using it wrong 🙄. " Yeah, well fuck you, you're using it wrong. This isn't the type of thing Proxmox is designed to do, period.

  • Isolation at the project level. I want experiments boxed up with a defined blast radius. In CloudStack I lean on projects and tenants that make that real; on Proxmox I found myself reinventing isolation with naming schemes and poorly configured SDNs.

  • Fast teardown without archaeology. When I delete a “stack,” I don’t want orphaned networks, half-attached volumes, and floating IPs to become next month’s mystery. CloudStack treats all that as first-class. In Proxmox, it’s easy to delete VMs fast; the rest becomes a me problem.

  • Networking as a first-class toy box. I makeover layer-3/4 constantly: NATs, ACL-ish rules, per-network knobs. Proxmox SDN has matured a lot, but my brain is happier when the cloud model is the default.

  • First class automation. I automate from the start. Templates, playbooks, userdata, and Terraform. Proxmox can be automated, obviously. It supports SDNs, cloud-init, and has a mature Terraform provider, I just kept falling back to the (admittedly excellent) GUI and then forgetting what I clicked three weeks later.

Why CloudStack clicked for me

  • OpenStack was really hard to configure. No, seriously, it's installation guide is like a 120 page PDF and people have made their entire career just kind of understanding it.

  • Cloud-native workflows. Template + service offering + network offering → instance. Delete the project and the networks, IPs, and volumes go with it. I don’t need to remember where I left a VLAN.

  • Multi-tenant. Accounts/projects and quotas are built in. Even though I’m one human, I behave like I’ll forget what I did—future-me counts as another tenant. I also segregate services is this way. I have a tenant that is my "production" environment where stable services live, and I have another tenant where I can safely nuke everything without risk.

  • Topology as a service. I can swap network offerings and redeploy without manually re-wiring a dozen places, and after I build it I can reuse it wherever I want.

  • Fits my “treat the lab like prod” kink. I get a control plane, agents, hosts, clusters—the boring scaffolding that forces me to act like changes matter.

What I give up by not using Proxmox

  • The friendliest day-one experience. Proxmox wins for “get a VM running in five minutes.” CloudStack makes you think about zones, clusters, and storage from the jump. That being said, I don't really think this is true. To get a VM running on Proxmox you either need to use a template, just like CloudStack, or actually work through the install process of an OS. The latter is often time consuming and doing it more than once is a surefire way to make sure I second guess whatever toy I want to try.

  • PBS and the cozy ecosystem. Proxmox Backup Server is excellent; the community is huge; the GUI is chef’s kiss. In general I really think the Homelab community is lacking a good affordable / Open Source backup solution. Proxmox solves this with PBS.

  • Less scaffolding to babysit. With CloudStack I earn a control plane I also must maintain. That’s overhead. I chose it on purpose. Proxmox does a fantastic job with encapsulating everything you need into this tidy box with a gorgeous UI, CloudStack on the other hand gives you the gorgeous UI, the infrastructure is on you.

  • A shitload less infrastructure. Proxmox can run on an Intel NUC comfortably. Cloudstack assumes you have infrastructure in place for dynamic VLAN segregation, multiple nodes for high availability, and a group of identical hardware for the nodes. Not everyone has this type of gear.

A tiny, honest example

Weekend goal: try a 6-VM k3s cluster with three network tiers and a janky egress idea.

  • In CloudStack I defined a project, picked a template, attached the network offering I abuse for lab VPCs, and stamped the nodes. On Sunday I deleted the project and the whole thing vanished—subnets, public IPs, volumes, the works.

  • In Proxmox I would have had fast clones and a great GUI, but teardown would have felt like archaeology unless I scripted every step—and if I’m scripting everything, I might as well lean into a cloud control plane that enforces the shape for me.

This is not a conversion pitch

If you’re running a couple VMs, some LXC containers, maybe Ceph, and you like a great GUI, use Proxmox. If you’re building and burning down environments for fun, CloudStack’s opinionated cloud-ness may save you from your own chaos. I picked the one that punished my habits the least.

Further reading (general docs, not deep links)

Game of Life

Wikipedia
Slow150msFast

Patterns