I use it at home, as a test environment as I brought it to 2 workplaces. I have a mysql VM and a front end VM.

Ok, understood. So if you’re not online, you pretty much lose messages, or are they cached and the next time the sender is online you get them?

My use case is a kid using a minecraft server and wants to talk to his friends, and we’re using mumble now, but they want “discord” and they want things like plugins that allow mgmt from the discord channels, which I would be willing to try to develop, but the model pretty much requires a server to be online.

In general, I’m trying to make a small internet for my kids and their friends to have “normal” internet experiences without being on the wider internet. No youtube, but pinchflat -> jellyfin. No discord, but mumble. No google drive, but nextcloud.

I have been exploring self-hosted Discord alternatives and had been looking at Rocket Chat, so I am wondering what is the pitch for this versus something like that? I am very early in my exploration, of course.

I think you are looking at this wrong. Proxmox is not prod ready yet, but it is improving and the market is pushing the incumbent services into crappier service for higher prices. Broadcom is making VMware dip below the RoI threshold, and Hyper-v will not survive when it is dragging customers away from the Azure cash cow. The advantage of proxmox is that it will persist after the traditional incumbents are afterthoughts (think xenserver). That’s why it is a great option for the homelab or lab environment with previous gen hardware . Proxmox is missing huge features…vms hang unpredictably if you migrate vms across hosts with different CPU architectures (Intel -> AMD), there is no cluster-wide startup order, and things like DRS equivalents are still separate plugins. That being said knowing it now and submitting feedback or patches positions you to have a solution when MS and Broadcom price you out of on-prem.