Proxmox vs. XCP-ng: Which one’s better for your home lab?

Whether you’re a distro-hopper or someone who loves self-hosting, a home lab serves as a useful addition to your computing setup. Depending on your specific needs, you can go for anything from a tiny SBC to an enterprise-grade server setup for the hardware. But when it comes to the software aspect, Proxmox remains the OS of choice for a significant fraction of home lab enthusiasts.

That said, there are a couple of other virtualization platforms worth considering, and XCP-ng is especially popular among users who’ve transitioned from ESXi. In this post, we’ll pit the Xen-based XCP-ng against the KVM-powered Proxmox to see which one emerges on top.

Ease of installation and UI

Winner: Proxmox, and its simple interface

When it comes to the setup procedure, both Proxmox and XCP-ng have a straightforward process, though the former is a bit easier to install. Since the Proxmox installation wizard groups multiple settings under each tab, it feels a bit faster to configure everything than the numerous menus you need to navigate when setting up XCP-ng.

However, I would’ve called it a draw if not for the web-based user interfaces of both platforms. As of version 8.3 of XCP-ng, you can access a web UI called XO Lite after typing the IP address of your server into the web browser. Unfortunately, the new interface is still in its fledgling state, and there isn’t a lot you can do with it at the moment. As such, you’ll have to deploy another VM to run XOA, which makes the process a little tricky. Contrast this with the simple yet highly intuitive UI of its rival, and it’s clear why Proxmox wins this round.

Stability and bugs (rather, the lack thereof)

Winner: XCP-ng, easy

Troubleshooting is one of the biggest aspects of a home lab, though nobody wants an OS that’s prone to crashes. While I’ve had mostly positive experiences with Proxmox and XCP-ng, the former has its fair share of issues. One of the most common bugs I’ve experienced involves the UI randomly freezing for a couple of seconds after running the Proxmox PVE for a few hours.

XCP-ng and by extension, Xen Orchestra, never had these weird freezes, even after I ran them for several hours. I’ve also had issues setting up Proxmox whenever I used my RTX 3080 Ti as the primary display device, while the same GPU worked without any hiccups in XCP-ng.

ZFS support and VDI storage

Winner: Proxmox

As a long-time TrueNAS Core/Scale user, ZFS remains my file system of choice when I want to set up multiple drives in RAID configurations. Thankfully, Proxmox features full support for ZFS out-of-the-box, and it’s possible to monitor all your ZFS-based RAID files from the web UI. Meanwhile, XCP-ng requires you to install the ZFS package, and while that isn’t a dealbreaker in and of itself, the lack of monitoring provisions definitely is.

Furthermore, XCP-ng restricts the file size of the VDI to 2TB, while Proxmox doesn’t have such a limitation. For the average tinkerer, that’s more than enough. But once you start working on advanced projects that hog up like there’s no tomorrow, you might end up hitting that limit before you know it.

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Containerization

Winner: Proxmox, and it’s not even close!

VMs may have their own benefits, but containers are just as useful in a home server. Proxmox features built-in LXC containerization, and while they’re not enough to replace their Docker counterparts, LXC containers are fantastic for numerous projects once you combine them with the TurnKey templates you can download inside the web UI.

In contrast, XCP-ng only supports VMs. Well, it technically lets you create a Kubernetes server via an additional plugin, but that’s not enough for the platform to claim victory over Proxmox’s solid LXC container technology.

Clustering

Winner: XCP-ng and its easy-to-setup clusters

Although both Proxmox and XCP-ng allow you to create high-availability setups, I’ve always gravitated toward the latter for clustering. As a tool hand-crafted for production environments, it’s far easier to configure an HA cluster in XCP-ng than Proxmox. All you have to do is connect XOA with the hosts, add shared storage, and enable HA in the UI. Meanwhile, Proxmox has a longer process, where you’ll have to clear the guests on secondary nodes before you can add them to a cluster, making it quite a hassle when you’ve got different VMs and containers running on all your hosts.

Backup

Winner: Proxmox (by a small margin)

When you’re running the free versions of XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra, you won’t be able to access any backup options, as all the features are only available to paid users… or so it would appear. Thankfully, you can compile XOA using some terminal commands to circumvent the paid-only requirement. Heck, with this method, you can even save your XOA config!

However, Veeam recently integrated backup support for Proxmox after dropping VMware. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a game-changer for creating backups. Sure, the fact that PVE host backup isn’t available yet is quite the buzzkill. But in my book, the simplicity of the backup process in Proxmox puts it above XCP-ng.

Proxmox vs. XCP-ng: Which one should you go for?

Proxmox for home labs; XCP-ng for professional production environments

By now, you may have noticed that I didn’t mention the performance category. That’s because, in all my tests, I found the two platforms identical in performance. For average home lab projects, both Proxmox and XCP-ng were equally responsive even after deploying multiple VMs on each platform.

That said, Proxmox gets my vote as the best OS for home lab users. It’s quite simple to set up, supports LXC containers, and provides pretty much every feature you’d want from a home lab inside its easily accessible UI.

But that doesn’t mean XCP-ng is a terrible virtualization platform. In fact, I’d put it above Proxmox when you want to create a production environment geared toward a business and other professional workloads. While some might disagree with me, Xen remains a perfectly fine hypervisor in 2024, and you won’t have any issues using XCP-ng as a home lab environment.