When I first migrated my virtualized homelab stuff from my old Debian with KVM and virt-manager to a mini PC running Proxmox, I knew I would want to eventually have some sort of cluster manager. It didn’t take long before I had Proxmox running on a second Mini PC at home, and this week I am migrating my off-site Raspberry Pi’s Seafile server to another mini PC running Proxmox.
How can you get all that stuff into a single web interface? Proxmox will let you add a bunch of servers to a cluster, but that pushes the high-availability services pretty hard. You need to have a minimum number of machines to maintain a quorum, you need very low latency between your Proxmox hosts, and you need a clustered file system underneath.
Setting up my 1.5-liter N100 off-site Proxmox host with 14 terabytes of storage
I want one of my Proxmox nodes to live in another city. My nodes aren’t a cluster, and they aren’t interchangeable. One of my nodes is plugged into a 3D printer. Two other nodes have external USB hard disks tied to specific virtual machines. I don’t need things migrating around on their own. I just want a unified GUI, and I would like to be able to manually migrate virtual machines and LXC containers around without doing a convoluted backup and restore cycle.
Proxmox’s Datacenter Manager has only had an alpha release so far, and it doesn’t have all that many features yet, but it scratches every single itch that I have.
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What does Proxmox Datacenter Manager do well?
Installation was a breeze thanks to the Proxmox Helper Script. I had an LXC container up and running in a couple of minutes, and it took less than ten minutes to add all three of my Proxmox nodes via their Tailscale addresses. Using Tailscale means my Datacenter Manager can see all my nodes no matter where they are physically located.
The dashboard shows the CPU utilization of my ten busiest guests, ten busiest nodes, and my ten most memory hungry nodes. That is a pretty boring view for me, because my homelab isn’t all that complicated. My guests don’t tend to do anything exciting.
The exciting page for me is the remotes tab. It shows a combined list of the task history of all my nodes. This makes it easy to see at a glance if any of my backup tasks have failed.
From there, you can drill down into each remote. That will show a summary page that looks very similar to the summary page on each individual Proxmox server. Even better, though, is that there is a little paper airplane icon next to each guest. This lets you easily migrate containers and virtual machines to a different host. I don’t do this often, but I am excited to have a simple interface to make it happen when I need to balance the load on my servers!
Removing nodes from Proxmox Datacenter Manager is a breeze
Well, it is almost a breeze. You do have to manually grab the TLS key from each new server to paste into your Datacenter Manager interface. This isn’t exactly a friction-free experience, but it also isn’t a herculean effort.
I goofed up the partitioning on my new off-site Proxmox host, and I decided that the cleanest way to fix my mistake was to reinstall the node from scratch. Removing a node from a Proxmox cluster is bit of a pain. My understanding is that if you need to remove a node that no longer exists you might have your work cut out for you.
I don’t think this Allocations section shows up anywhere in the usual Proxmox GUI. It is a handy summary to have!
I thought I might be able to get away with updating my remote node’s certificate fingerprint, but Proxmox Datacenter Manager gave me an error when it tried to reconnect. Even though my old node was gone, I had it deleted and set back up in less than a minute.
Easy-peasy.
Was it easy to get working with Tailscale?
I already have Tailscale running on each of my Proxmox hosts. There is a simple Proxmox helper script that installs Tailscale in your LXC containers for you, so I just used that to add Tailscale to the Datacenter Manager container.
My Proxmox hosts were all grumpy about using Tailscale’s Magic DNS. That isn’t a big deal. My Proxmox hosts only need to be able to talk to each other and to my NAS devices for backup purposes. I wound up configuring all my hosts to use the local DNS server, and I added the five relevant IP addresses to the hosts file on each Proxmox server and the Datacenter Manager container.
I made sure to use the Tailscale hostname when I added remote hosts to the Datacenter Manager GUI. They all seem to be talking happily.
I won’t be able to do proper testing until I send my remote Proxmox server home with Brian next time have pizza here on a Saturday night!
Conclusion
Proxmox Datacenter Manager has been a missing piece in my homelab journey, offering a streamlined way to manage nodes both across the house and across town without the rigid demands of a full-on Proxmox cluster. By bridging standalone Proxmox hosts—whether in my office, in the network cupboard on the other side of my house, or sitting off-site at Brian’s house—it delivers the unified GUI and manual migration capabilities I craved.
Adding Tailscale to the mix erased geographical barriers, while features like cross-host task monitoring and one-click VM/LXC migrations made previously fragmented management into a cohesive experience. For an alpha-stage tool, it is impressive that it is already able to do everything I actually require. Even so, I am looking forward to some of the features on the Proxmox Datacenter Manager roadmap!
If you’re tinkering with Proxmox, juggling nodes in different locations, or just love geeking out over homelab workflows, I’d love to hear about your setup! Join our Discord community to swap tips, troubleshoot quirks, and explore using tools like Tailscale and Proxmox together. Whether you’re a clustering pro or a DIY novice, there’s always room to learn, share, and streamline your lab. Let’s build smarter setups—without the headaches.
Join the Discord here and let’s keep the conversation going! 🚀