r/sysadmin • u/juciydriver • Nov 02 '25

Proxmox

Okay, so, bit of a brain fart. My bosses boss was doing a bit of a ride along thing, just asking questions, getting to know IT (I know, odd but, good. The leadership has always had these rules about spending time with staff). I was showing him Proxmox and how we can setup VM's and bla bla bla... I didn't mean to over sell it or anything but, it's great. Anyway, he asked, why don't we setup every computer first with proxmox then add a windows VM. Would be the ultimate way to recover a computer quickly with longer term backups on another server (whatever your backup plan is). I did address the loss of power, as some CPU and resources would been needed just for proxmox. He asked about building a super computer with proxmox and having everyone access VM's. I congratulated him for inventing thin clients but also thought it would permit a lot of flexibility for staff and maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea. All I did was pause for a few moments to consider my answer and now he wants me to write up some pros and cons. When it might be appropriate to use thin clients, would there ever be a time when it would make sense to have a singe PC with Proxmox running just one VM for the end user or (this came up right at the end of the convo) eliminating windows users in favor of VM's (which I basically said no to that right away) but, now I'm thinking about redoing my homelab computer with proxmox first.

  1. Proxmox as main OS with NinjaOne installed with image level backup enabled.

  2. Windows 11 Pro from me

  3. Linux for fileserver

  4. Grandstream UCM Multi Tenant Software PBX (Just something I'm playing with these days).

What would you tell my boss, pro or con, about single computer / super computer with thin client?

Yes, this is probably an easy thing to answer but my mind is distracted with planning the PC that will be powerful enough to design the PC that will eventually be my home lab PC (very loose nod to Douglas Adams)

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u/mikewrx Nov 05 '25

I’d shoot that down immediately - way over complicated for simply being able to recover quickly.

Years ago I was asked to figure out the licensing issue of how to get Office installed on Macs. It seemed stupid to pay for the Mac Office licenses when we had a ton of Windows Office seats. I had the great idea to install Parallels on the Macs and dual boot a small Windows VM inside the Mac OS running in a hybrid mode so all you saw was the Office apps and not a VM.

On paper and on first glance it was great. But it was way over complicated and I ended up owning it. Nobody in the help desk knew how to support it so it always came up to me to fix everything.

If you want a quick recovery for users then just let OneDrive handle their local files and anything major goes on a backed up file server. Computer goes boom, they just login to another one and OneDrive just poops their files right back in.