Is the Raspberry Pi5 the better Proxmox Server?

30 thoughts on “Is the Raspberry Pi5 the better Proxmox Server?”

• I find docker unintuitive compared to baremetal or other hypervisor.
  Long ago I migrated from vmware to Proxmox on X86. Early days was unreliable and a learning curve, now it is stable and mature. I expect IF Proxmox adopt it officially then it will become a useful resource but there will still be room for AWS/Akami cloud hypervisors

• 8GB is the limit – not the CPU type – you can run almost anything on aarm64

• I have two (three, but one USB died) Raspberry Pi 4 8GB with Proxmox PVE installed.

  On one, I have Home Assistant HASS OS full install, and two containers – an nginx Proxy and PiHole.

  On the other, I have OctoPrint with USB pass-through to my 3D printer.

  I have a server running Proxmox PVE. I also have a Proxmox PVE and a Proxmox PBS VM running on Hyper-V on my Windows 11 desktop.

  They're all clustered so I can manage each from the other, and all are backed up to the PBS on my desktop. It's brilliant!

  On the server, I have OpnSense as my primary firewall.

• Eeeeh … an N100 is far more powerful and … power efficient. I do love the idea of ARM LXCs and VMs buuuuuut …. Power being at 43 cents per KWh here …. A pi 5 8 gigs = 100€ … A N100 512Gigs NVME & 16Gb lpDDR5 = 160€…….. See where I'm going?

  The pi is supposed to be CHEAP. And at that price point I'm sorry but it cannot compete – Each one of my N100 machine is filled to the brim with VMs, LXCs and so on and so forth. So, being a MAJOR fan of the pi …. I somehow think that became lost. The fact that so many companies use pis either as backup machines ready to go (there's a pi3 downstairs sitting on a rack if the main server was to fail, which already happened in the past due to a non-redundant PSU) or directly as an edge unit made them forget that we're mere tinkerers, and that price is quite the important factor.

  Why would I fight against my ARM SBC to produce far worse results than a cheap N100-powered mini PC? I designed and printed my own mini-pc rack for goddamn sake… Because the line between a pi and a mini-PC became too blurry. I bet they do not care one bit, for we are not longer their target market … But sooner or later people are going to stop spending weeks of their lives improving the OS and various packages …

  Dear RP foundation: please stop digging your own grave and get back to the basics. Nobody is stopping you from making boards for the enterprise. But create a clear delimitation.

  Edit: and do remember that your cores are effing weak when compared to what the big ones are brewing up. Your only asset is your community – so stop being an arse to said community with these pricings.

• Why would you need Raspberry Pi OS though? When it comes to server applications I don't see any reason to use something other than Ubuntu/Debian or Rocky/Fedora.

• How can you use rp5 as a proxy server?

• solid review andreas – tysm as always sir!

• 👍👍

• 😃🤠

• Given the problems running the desktop this reminds me of the initial issues getting to run Android on virtual PC. The graphics made available by the hypervisor are not the same as the machine it is running on.

• Use the UEFI ARM ISO exclusively. If you intend to utilize a .img image (also with UEFI), import it using the "qm importdisk …." command, as the graphical UI doesn't support this. Additionally, configure affinity due to the big.LITTLE architecture; you cannot use both a little and big core for a virtual machine.

• Considering that Proxmox and Raspian (=Raspberry OS) are basically only slightly – if even – changed Debian systems there probably only was some misconfigured settings for the vms.

• Can it run Android? Might be a good option for app testing, without the performance penalty of emulating ARM on x86. (Too bad Swagbucks is no longer worth mining, otherwise spinning up a few mining instances would be a good use of a Pi.)

• Hi Andreas, could you please test some mini pcs running N100 cpu? This could be in continuation to your videos of replacing rpi

• I got proxmox up and running on m y Pi5 with an NVME hat a few weeks ago. I even got windows arm running in a VM. Running inside a KVM VM is not what a lot of distros are expecting (They're used to running on bare metal. Sometimes picking the video type 'ramfb' can help.

  One thing that will help a lot is the adoption of UEFI in the arm ecosystem. Arm has had a bootloader/firmware problem for a while and uboot has only gotten about half way there as arm boards are still stuck in little islands of firmware compatibility. UEFI is making headway and if board manufactures and OS vendors adopt UEFI getting everything to run will be a lot easier.

• Why would you specifically want Rasperry OS inside a VM? It's just customized Debian for the Raspberry hardware, but inside a VM, it doesn't have any Raspberry hardware, so…that kinda makes it redundant.

• Cool that you have the opportunity to install Proxmox on the RPi5. It could be useful for me. Instead of me having x number of SD cards with x operative systems, I can have them all together in Proxmox with the opportunity to snapshot and take backup of the VMs to my NAS.
  I bought a USB C to Lenovo power connector, so I could connect my Lenovo SFF M700 Tiny to my power adapter and powerbank. This gave me the feeling of having a Raspberry Pi, but more powerful. It requires a power adapter and powerbank supporting 20V and 3.25A. With all the GaN power adapters out there, it is possible to find one supporting 20V.

• 3:46 I get what you are saying. Youtubers show the installation process and that is possible to install but they dont actually make any use of it down the road to see if its actually usable when adding software. (this goes for many things not just proxmox on a pi). That is why i like your content and i appreciate your time and effort making these videos

• Thank you for spreading your crystallized knowledge

• N100 NUC. WAY better for proxmox, and you can get it almost the same form factor in the right configuration

• 9:09
  Did you try openwrt? Its for arm devices.

• Very helpful infos as always. Finally a good explanation on Proxmox running on a pi 5. I have to give it a try. Many Thanks!

• in the process of upgrading a pi3 running HAOS to a pi5 but I know its overpowered. Is it easy to run HA as a container or VM and make the usb and bluetooth on the PI 5 available for pass thru? I need them for the wireless zigbee and zwave dongles.

• I think the Rpi5 is quite a bad deal compared with OrangePI 5/5 plus based on rockchip. First of all for heavy loads you can buy enough ram. Second is on-board faster NVM-E without dongles. Third it is actually WAY better in every single metric than the rpi5… And the price is almost the same. Anyway… neither of those are good hosts for virtual machines nor will be in the near future.

• please use virtio and don't leave the default scsi and e1000 drivers…

  Also the verdict is that you don't understand the difference between an iso and a disk image.

• I migrated everything to a i7-1360P intel nuc, 64gb running proxmox and it is so over kill

• Hi Andreas, on Github, you have Pimox7 (account : pimox) that is a Proxmox V7 port to the RPi – I never used it, so it may be worth testing it, even if the last update is one year old.

  Also note that an article from january the 12th 2024 on geeky-gadgets offers to install Proxmox V8.1 on a RPi 5 because it supports… booting from UEFI (title : "Installing Proxmox 8.2 virtualization platform on a Raspberry Pi 5"), it also references a video about that.

• Very interesting. If I have a free wish I would vote for a few words on performance of the virtual machines (especially home-assistant).
  I bought a Mini-PC and use proxmox on it as recommended here. And I'm happy with it.

• Not and expert here… I have a Pi5 and a Nuc like PC and I was planning to install ProxMox on it, so maybe I need to watch some of your video that I skipped (or was not attentive). However, I discovered that qemu (used by ProxMox) can emulate a Pi3… so normally you could run an image made for the Pi and supposed to run on arm hardware, inside a box on an x86 server.
  I wonder if you investigated this possibility… now I need to find your video on ProxMox. 🙂

• Thanks.

Comments are closed.