Proxmox’s powerful virtualization prowess, support for LXCs (and OCI images with VE 9.1), and clustering provisions are only a part of what makes it a terrific home lab platform. Technically, ESXi may have a more fleshed-out collection of first-party tools, but Proxmox is slowly working its way up with official and community-created offerings. You’ve got Proxmox Backup Server to create space-efficient snapshots of your virtual guests, while the Mail Gateway lets you add an extra layer of protection to your self-hosted email server.