Yes, yes, yes, yes. For the tiny amount of overhead, even the remote console is worth it. Especially when you get into crazy “omg I have so much hardware” homelab territory and have stuff strewn over half your home. Being able to rely on Proxmox being pretty rock solid (if you’re careful and smart about your upgrades and not constantly insisting on running bleeding edge), and being able to access the consoles and ‘reset buttons’ of all your VMs from a single computer is AMAZING.

for sure a proxmox server is great, id just say don’t go for the cluster just yet. Frankly, most self hosted stuff is dockerized and thats a huge plus. And it seems you already have that sorted out (id even ask you if casa OSs fileshare and an external drive could handle the NAS aspect).

I say this not to be a killjoy, but because I have a proxmox node I both overbuilt (for small services and running off a UPS) and underbuilt (for multiple big VMs) all because bought it to, and i kid you mot, “use it for NAS, and a window VM and run other random things that I don’t know yet”. 2 years in and i still don’t know what those random things are.

So, my two cents: start cheap get a node to learn and understand where you want to go from there.

Absolutely. You’re going to be paying for more overhead but I’ve never regretting setting up a cluster. I run mine on a t5500, a dl360 gen 6, and a raspberry pi as a witness.

On the cluster I’m running pfsense, file shares, home assistant, a pihole, and a Debian vm with docker that has containers running radarr, sonarr, watchtower, plex, jackett, and mealie. Also spin up various VMs for testing.