HiveStation — Developer Workstation for Proxmox Virtual Environment​

Formerly "Proxmox VE Developer Workstation" — renamed to HiveStation for Proxmox trademark compliance.
HiveStation is an independent community project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH. Proxmox is a registered trademark of Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH.

What is HiveStation?​

HiveStation is a set of 8 bash scripts (S1 → S8) that automate the installation of a developer workstation based on Proxmox Virtual Environment 9 on Debian 13 (Trixie).

Inspired by the Proxmox VE wiki article "Developer Workstations with Proxmox VE and X11".

Features​

• Btrfs RAID1 on 2 disks with dedicated subvolumes for Proxmox VE services
• UEFI HA: two EFI partitions kept in sync — system boots if one disk fails
• SWAP failover: automatic switch from SWAP1 to SWAP2 if primary disk is absent
• Automatic disk replacement: detects a missing RAID1 member and replaces it
• Bootable snapshots: Snapper + grub-btrfs — snapshots visible in GRUB menu
• VM/LXC networking: vmbr0 bridge with dynamic NAT toward WAN interface (ethernet or Wi-Fi)
• Graphical interface: GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LMDE7 Cinnamon, or COSMIC with Flatpak + Flathub
• NVIDIA driver: open kernel modules (recommended Turing+, required Blackwell) or proprietary (legacy GPUs) with automatic iGPU/dGPU detection, Wayland/X11 PRIME configuration
• Optional XanMod kernel: BBRv3, ThinLTO optimizations
• Themes and tools: Custom GRUB/Plymouth boot themes, asusctl/supergfxctl (ASUS ROG/TUF), GNOME monitoring widget, custom logo support

Installation overview​

NVIDIA driver options (S6)​

Version​

Current version: V17 — 2026-04-03

All scripts are bilingual (French / English).

Download​

See attachment below.

Why btrfs instead of zfs? Wouldn't it make sense to be able to use ZFS-only features?

I've been trying to do this with ZFS for a while now, but I'm running into bugs that aren't currently solvable. For example, zfsbootmenu doesn't work when used with the pre-compiled Void EFI image; no snapshot is visible at boot due to modifications made by the Proxmox VE installation. Creating the EFI image from scratch makes it even worse. Zfsbootmenu was developed primarily for Void; it works with other distributions, but I haven't found a solution for this particular problem.

Another point: I'm using this configuration on a laptop, and ZFS is extremely slow at startup, shutdown, and during daily use. The CPU load is between 5 and 10% higher. The same issue with RAM persisted. Even after trying to modify the ARC cache to minimize RAM usage, I experienced crashes. I had to allocate a minimum of 4GB to ARC for it to function, so ultimately, whithout any VM, RAM usage quickly climbed to around 8GB.

I couldn't get the laptop to boot even if a disk failed. If you use ZFS with Proxmox tools, it won't boot if the boot disk is faulty; you have to use the command line to resolve the problem. Without Proxmox tools, it's also impossible because once the ZFS partition is degraded, there's no way to boot from a mirror (it works on a RAIDZ1 array with three disks, but not in a mirror configuration, I don't know why).

There are other issues as well, but basically, that's why I chose BTRFS instead of ZFS.

If someone manages to solve the three biggest problems I mentioned, I would obviously use ZFS, but currently it's not possible in my case.

The reason I started this project, in case anyone asks, is that I had a problem with an SSD in late 2025 (both the boot and system SSD), and I wasted time reinstalling everything (no data loss).