Peter Mac

Building Resilient Infrastructure: An Ansible-Driven Approach to Proxmox Service Deployment

When building a homelab or small-scale production environment, the challenge isn’t just getting services running—it’s creating an architecture that’s resilient, repeatable, and maintainable over time. After iterating through various approaches, I’ve settled on an Ansible-driven deployment strategy for my Proxmox infrastructure that addresses these requirements while maintaining operational simplicity.

Lessons from the Lab: Multi-VLAN Networking on Proxmox with a UDM Pro

Setting up Proxmox in a multi-VLAN environment sounds straightforward on paper. But when I started configuring my own home lab with a UniFi Dream Machine Pro (UDM Pro) managing the network and several VLANs in play I quickly discovered that getting Proxmox to behave across VLANs is more art than science.

When running a stable home server with Docker containers for services like Traefik (reverse proxy), Plex (media server), Calibre (e-book library), Home Assistant, Mosquitto (MQTT), and Zigbee2MQTT, it’s natural to ask: should I stick with Docker on bare metal or move to Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE)? 

A couple of lessons I’ve learned along the way to smooth the HA journey to minimise outages and keep the sanity of your family intact by avoiding the failure of any of the automations they’ve all come to expect as standard.