David Nguyen shared his home setup with Proxmox running, and it was fascinating. I can't replicate his setup here at my home office, but I did make several changes based on what I learned.
First, it seemed obvious that there was no point in clustering two cheap-o mini PCs. Combine that conclusion with the fact that there's a brand new version of Proxmox available, I started from scratch, downloaded and installed Proxmox 8.0 on only one of the cheap-o units. I was previously running Proxmox 7.4. Same deal - burn the ISO to a thumb drive and boot from the thumb drive to install. The whole effort took practically no time at all.
Pi-hole
This time, I installed something called Pi-hole. Pi-hole is a DNS sinkhole. You set your DNS server to the Pi-hole IP address and it redirects requests for ads into the great beyond. What I like about this approach is that I don't need an browser-based ad-blocker for 99% of the sites I visit. This should eliminate all those pop-ups that say "disable your ad blocker if you want to see this content".
Despite the name, Pi-hole is not limited to being installed on a Raspberry Pi. I installed it as a container on Proxmox. If you're familiar with Docker, you know that containers are faster and more efficient than virtual machines. So even on this cheap-o junk mini PC, Pi-hole runs like a champ.
If you install Pi-hole, you can add a bunch of optional ad site lists. You can find a bunch of them here on the Firebog. One word of warning, though. I recommend you try adding one list at a time (or disable them all and enable them one at a time). Then test out the sites you frequent to make sure they all work. One of the lists blocked access to t.co URLs, and one of the sites I visit requires access to t.co. I disabled that list and was back in business. On second thought, I re-enabled all the lists and simply whitelisted t.co, and that works.
Turnkey VMs
David has written about Turnkey Linux here (check out his post). I knew about it but never investigated it until now. Turnkey Linux is a collection of pre-installed, pre-configured ISOs for various appliances. These are ideal for VMs. I installed the Media Server Appliance on Proxmox, and I have plans to connect a USB drive where I keep all my videos. The media server is Jellyfin, and there's a Jellyfin app for my Roku. So that's a project I'll pursue.
Here's something I experimented with: After I installed and configured the Media Server, I converted it to a template. Then I cloned that template into a thin VM. Supposedly, that requires less disk space than a full fledged VM. I'll see if it works out that way. I also installed an Ubuntu container.
Next, I will install a Windows 11 VM again. I want to experiment with a display driver called SPICE. You can use SPICE to access the desktop remotely, the same way you might use VNC. It is supposedly faster than VNC. We shall see.
I also plan to install the LAPP appliance and play with that. That's similar to LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP), only it substitutes PostgreSQL for MySQL.
As of now, however, this is what my Proxmox server looks like:
