VMs & Containers

For a Debian 13 VM , you can keep the disk storage at 16 GB. it’s still tiny and avoids ever having to resize later if you add monitoring tools or extra services.

A minimal Debian install uses ~2–3 GB storage space. The rest gives you room for packages, logs, swap, and future updates. If no actual data lives on the VM disk, there’s no reason to go crazy.

RAM: 1–2 GB is sufficient. Samba serving files from an NFS mount is very lightweight. If you expect many concurrent users or large transfers, 2 GB gives a comfortable buffer for caching.

On a Proxmox VM with dedicated RAM, swap just adds unnecessary disk I/O and latency. If the VM ever needs more memory, it’s better to hot-add RAM in Proxmox than to let it swap to a virtual disk. Set your VM with no swap partition and use all disk space for the root filesystem.

If you’re using the Debian installer, just skip the swap partition step and allocate everything to /