Most people land in one of these. If you’re not sure, send us your VM count and total RAM and we’ll tell you which one fits.
| Setup | Good for | Storage | Network | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One host | A lab, a handful of VMs, a small private cloud where a few minutes of downtime for a reboot is fine | Local disks with ZFS | Public port plus IPMI | From $126/mo; $248/mo for a Xeon D-1541 with 64 GB |
| Three-node HA cluster | Production VMs that should restart on another node when hardware fails | Ceph across the three nodes | 10 Gbps private network between nodes | Quoted per build |
| Compute plus storage nodes | Bigger estates, or anyone moving a VMware cluster with a lot of data | Dedicated storage servers running Ceph, plus a backup target | 10 Gbps private network | Quoted per build |
Why three nodes? Proxmox needs a majority of nodes online to keep the cluster quorate, and with two you lose that the moment one goes down. Two nodes can work with an external QDevice vote, but three is the setup we’d run ourselves. The Proxmox cluster documentation covers the details.