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Home lab: Setting Up Proxmox

·470 words·3 mins
Home Lab
Table of Contents

As part of my home lab series, I will be writing a series of blog posts on how to set up different home lab components. In today’s blog post, I will be writing about how to setup Proxmox.

What is Proxmox? #

Proxmox is a hypervisor that allows you to run virtual machines and containers. You can think of it as a VM manager.

It contains many features, listed below (non-exhaustive):

  1. Host different operating systems.
  2. Managing VMs on different machines (clustering).
  3. High availability VMs
  4. Backups and snapshots of VMs
  5. Creating templates from images
  6. Live migration of VMs across machines without downtime
  7. Role-based access control
  8. Bridged networking
  9. Ceph Software defined storage
  10. IPv4 and IPv6 Firewalls
  11. And many more…

To see the full list of features, visit their website.

Setting up Proxmox #

Step 1: Download the ISO File #

Proxmox Download
Proxmox download screen

Go to their website and download the ISO file.

Step 2: Burn it into a USB device #

There are many software which enables us to do this. In this tutorial, I will be using Rufus.

Download Rufus
Download Rufus

  1. Download Rufus.
  2. Plug in your USB device.

Selecting device and ISO in Rufus
Selecting device and ISO in Rufus

  1. Select your USB device in Rufus.
  2. Select the ISO file that you downloaded in step 1.
  3. Leave the rest of the options at default.
  4. Click on Start and wait for it to finish.

Alternatives:

  1. Etcher
  2. Ventoy

The website has instructions on how to use them.

Step 3: Boot from the USB device #

  1. Navigate to the bios of your computer.
  2. Change the boot order to boot from the USB device first.
  3. Save and exit.

Proxmox Installer Screen
Proxmox Installer Screen

  1. Restart your PC and it should boot into the USB drive. You will see a screen like the one above
  2. Select Install Proxmox VE (Graphical) and press enter.
  3. Follow the instructions and wait for it to finish.

Step 4: Login to Proxmox #

Proxmox Login Screen
Proxmox Login Screen

  1. Access the ip/fqdn of your Proxmox server in your browser.
  2. The username is root and the password is the one you set in the installation process.
  3. Once you are done, Proxmox is set up.

Uploading ISOs #

Local Storage
Local Storage

  1. To Upload ISOs, click on the local storage on the left

Upload ISO
Upload ISO

  1. Click on the upload button and upload the ISOs that you want to use for your VMs.

Creating VMs #

Create VM
Create VM

  1. Click on the create VM button.

VM Page
VM Page

  1. The name here refers to the name of your VM.
  2. Step through each of the pages and configure the VM to your liking
  3. Once you are done, click on finish and the VM will be created.

Console
Console

  1. You can access the VM using the console button when you click on the VM that you created.

Conclusion #

I hope that this blog post has helped you to setup Proxmox.

  1. Proxmox Official Website
  2. Proxmox ISOs
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