4 reasons why Proxmox is great for hosting a NAS

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Key findings

  • There is no need to dedicate an entire machine to a NAS operating system – convenient and efficient.
  • Proxmox delivers world-class virtualization performance in home lab setups.
  • Can serve as a central server for multiple non-NAS projects, including Hackintosh and gaming machine.



Thanks to its cutting-edge virtualization features, Proxmox offers one of the best platforms for home lab enthusiasts. Whether you're looking for an easy way to build a Hackintosh or you're planning to deploy a battalion of containers, Proxmox has everything you need. If you don't have a dedicated NAS in your setup, you can turn your Proxmox host into a full-fledged storage server – and here are four reasons why you should.


4 You don't have to restrict an entire machine to a NAS operating system

Proxmox is quite cheap

Like your average desktop operating system, TrueNAS Core/Scale, OpenMediaVault, and other NAS-centric operating systems must be installed on a host computer. This means you can't initialize them in containers and must dedicate an entire machine to your NAS.


Of course, you can get them running on virtual machines via VirtualBox or VMware Workstation/Fusion Pro, but Type 2 hypervisors aren't exactly known for their performance, so Proxmox offers a solid compromise for those who don't want to buy extra hardware for a separate NAS.

3 First-class performance in virtualization tasks

Finally, Proxmox is designed for home laboratories

When you're just starting out, you might only use your NAS for file sharing and backup purposes. But sooner or later, you'll find yourself diving headfirst into the containerization rabbit hole.


Although dedicated NAS operating systems like TrueNAS Scale are great for creating containers and VMs, Proxmox is on another level when it comes to virtualization. Thanks to its robust performance, it can easily run multiple containers simultaneously with your NAS virtual machine without breaking a sweat.

2 A central server for all your home lab projects

Including NAS, Hackintosh, home automation and even a game console

Proxmox is an all-round operating system for home servers and can do much more than just NAS tasks. Provided your hardware has enough memory as well as CPU cores and threads, you will have no problems running multiple projects alongside your NAS.

As someone who enjoys testing virtual machines, I really appreciate having my dual Xeon Proxmox server as the hub for all of my projects. Also, LXC containers are better optimized than you might think, and I often have at least one Proxmox container running Samba shares while I work on other home lab projects.


1 Multiple NAS configurations to choose from

With enough storage drives and network cards, you can even run these setups simultaneously!

Running a TrueNAS Scale VM on Proxmox

There are many ways you can build your storage server on Proxmox. A TrueNAS Scale or OMV powered VM should be enough for most users, but the real fun begins when you start experimenting with containers, sharing protocols, and Linux distributions.

Since Promox supports ZFS file systems, you can add all your storage drives to the platform and set up a container with SMB share permissions for a makeshift NAS. Alternatively, you can allocate some storage to a Debian virtual machine before installing Nextcloud and Jellyfin on said VM for a complete NAS, private cloud and media center experience!


However, Proxmox is not a replacement for high-end NAS setups

Building a NAS inside Proxmox is a good starting point to get familiar with the virtualization platform. However, I must admit that it is not a replacement for a traditional NAS.

While you can close the performance gap by dedicating lots of cores to your NAS VMs and containers, there's no denying that read/write speeds are much faster on dedicated bare-metal storage servers compared to virtualized Proxmox environments. For intensive NAS tasks, you'll need MD Raid and Ceph clusters configured on your Proxmox nodes, which can get pretty complex to start with. So if you're looking for an easy way to build a NAS, or want the power of a full-fledged Network-Attached Storage solution, you might want to consider building a dedicated storage server instead of going the Proxmox route.


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