Nesting - Proxmox within Proxmox - Complete private cloud

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nickwalt

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Sep 30, 2025
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Hi all. This is to implement a complete cloud infrastructure within a single home lab host. An Epyc 32-core CPU (ROME) server with 384 GB RAM and fast SSDs in LVM-thin configuration.

The original idea was to run Incus inside Proxmox VMs to host LXC guests. However, I read somewhere that Proxmox has special capabilities for nesting itself with VM and LXC guests. Wondering if Proxmox optimises the nested VMs, running leaner images and using the host software to reduce the overall footprint of each guest - thereby avoiding the installation of a full version of Proxmox as one would do on a physical host.

Cheers.
 
Read it on a blog and couldn't see how this was possible so had to ask. Thanks.

Looks like running LXC in a nested hypervisor will be performant enough for my requirements.
 
Incus und ProxmoxVE are both basically built around qemu/kvm for vms and lxc for containers. So I would expect that both have similiar capibalities, in fact nested virtualization and containers work on both with similiar caveats ( nested containers work best for lxc, for podman or docker they tend to break from time to timer after updates, nested virtualization has additional overhead and (depending on the used hardware) might not even work, although with an EPYC I would expect it to work (still with performance penalty due to the overhead) see https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Nested_Virtualization

Whether you use Incus or PVE in the end boils down to your preferences and whether one particular feature of one system is of interest for you. For example Incus also supports running on Arm64 while the arm64 ports for ProxmoxVE are inofficial community projects.
Another differende is that PVE has a more polished UI while Incus is more aimed at devops people (API first). But both also have an UI and API so it really boils down to your preferences.
 
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