Proxmox: Installation and Configuration 2023

hey everybody today we've got an exciting video we're actually going to be deploying proxmox on a dedicated machine well there's a slight Nuance there I'll be installing it on a virtual machine using hyper-v so that you can follow this video but the process will look and feel exactly the same as though you were installing it on your dedicated machine so why are we going to be using proxmox well I'll tell you the reasons that I use proxbox and I'll also go through some of the features they highlight on their website so the reason I moved to proxmox from hyper-v was several fold most prominent of which was the community hyper-v is quite popular I've seen it in the workplace or in terms of Home lobbying and that support that you're going to get on tap through Reddit and various other forums nothing seems to come close to proxbox yes there's esxi and VMware however that requires a license you can get it cheap for a couple of hundred pounds a year but still that's a cost I didn't want to have plus proxmox is open source that's right it installs on top of Debian and that's one of the reasons I was really attracted to it kind of supporting that open source movement what features does it give you more a question of what it doesn't for what I was looking for I wanted a solid virtualization platform built on Linux it uses KVM from links the kernel virtual machine it has a dedicated backup image so you can deploy a backup server it has email security I don't use that but it might be a consideration that you want to have for Enterprise another reason I wanted to use proxmox over hyper-v was how friendly is for Consumer Hardware because it uses a Linux kernel under the hood you get very granular access to that Hardware so as I was getting deeper into the home lab journey I wanted to do more advanced things I've already mentioned before about hardware passthrough and whilst this is possible on hyper-v it's a lot more difficult proxbox is typically a few extra lines in a config file and then a couple of Clicks in a GUI in hyper-v I was Finding I was having to be a Powershell whiz and also a lot of the times the options just weren't there because you had to be running Enterprise gear such as things like Intel xeons and I just didn't have those at the time now I've moved to proxmox now I do have Intel xeons in a proper Enterprise server am I going to go back to hyper-v no chance proxmox has been absolutely Rock Solid and I'd be hard-pressed to go anywhere else at this moment in time so as I mentioned before I'll be installing proxmox on hyper-v so that you that haven't moved to this don't have a dedicated machine you can still install proxmox and get yourself familiar with the UI and can join in some of these videos along the Route once you have a dedicated machine feel free to go and install proxmox and then you'll be right back up to speed with Where We Are so just walking through this process as you begin the install process in hyper-v you might be confronted with a blank screen you just need to hit return on that and it will skip I think it's just a bug with how it's being virtualized you will be presented with that message saying there's no KVM support now what that means is on a consumer processor nested virtualization I.E a virtual machine inside a virtual machine isn't supported or certainly isn't supported on the CPU I've got I've got a 9th gen Intel but you can just click OK that error message will go away and you can just continue the process as though you're on a physical machine so just accept the end user license agreement and that'll take you on to the next important step when I first installed proxmox I only had a single disk and that's fine it just means if that device fails you will lose your proxbox insulation and if you don't have a backup you'll have to do it from scratch since then I've gone away and I've just bought two cheap ish SSD drives I think I'm using the mx500s which are regularly on a sale they have dram on the ssds so that helps with the caching helps it wear out and ultimately helps with performance the beauty of that means that I have two drives in a mirror which means each drive has a copy exact one to one of the other Drive so you get better read speeds and also you get some redundancy now raid isn't a backup and you've probably heard that many times and it's very true raid gives you redundancy if one of those drives fails your machine will operate and you can pull out the faulty drive you can put a new drive in and you can recreate that mirror but don't worry if you don't you can continue with a single drive just understand the limitations and if you're happy with that that's fine if you want to add a drive at another time you can add a drive to that existing system so I recommend using ZFS raid 1 as this will allow you to expand in the future and ZFS also has many other benefits baked in such as native compression you'll then be presented with a network configuration now this is pretty straightforward typically the default values are correct what you will want to note is the management interface especially if you have more than one network interface card on your server you can choose which one you want to do typically the default one is the one you choose on your virtual machine you're likely only going to have one however in hyper-v you can add as many network adapters as you want just like we did the external switch from the previous video you'll be able to specify your IP address here that's probably going to be allocated through DHCP on your router your gateway should be pre-populated and you won't have to change that but that's effectively the IP address of your router and then your DNS server and again if you're on an ISP router that's likely going to be pre-populated so once you've gone through the installation process you'll see sort of the last message that's given to you is a URL as we had with the previous video things like nginx you'll want to go to that URL put it in your browser and you'll be presented with a login page you need to log in using the credentials you created on the installation and then you'll be presented with the proxmox screen now the screen I've got up is part of my proxmox cluster we'll get on to that later but a cluster in proxmox is simply when you have more than one physical node so if you ignore all of the virtual machines I've got running on there what I wanted to do is show you sort of what the user interface will look like on a live machine so as you can see in front of you I have two nodes proxmox Asus which is a small Xeon workstation board that's about five or six years old I managed to put that together for about 200 pounds I'm sure our friends across the pond you can do this even cheaper I've seen your eBay prices and I'm very jealous but it's just a a four core hyper thread so you get eight cores you can assign Within proxmox um it has uh 32 gigs of RAM and one cheap nvme Drive as you can see it's been happily singing away for sort of what's that 46 days um the Rams at about 70 so I'm probably coming to the limit of my available Ram um and in future if I'm gonna put more on here I like to keep a bit of overhead sort of 20 30 feels about right you'll see that the CPU usage is pretty flat so as I said you can get some of this old kit and the containers that you're likely going to run don't require a lot of compute power unless you're actively using them or unless they're doing things like video transcoding or or sort of computation in the background number crunching Etc they typically will idle away at sort of 20 and if you look at what I'm running on here this node is part of my kubernetes cluster it's my other physical node which is giving me that high availability my proxmox Dell node does most of the heavy lifting that has 40 cores 128 gigs of RAM but should that fail everything should fail over onto this machine including as you'll see on the left hand side my XG which is my firewall um that will also fail over so in the event of my Dell server going offline not only have I got all of my virtual machines on there my kubernetes cluster's still up and running my internet still works which keeps the family happy and it'll give you some brownie points we'll cover all of that in a later video but for now let's get into installing our first virtual machine now I mentioned in the last video that the docker VM you have running in your hyper-v can simply be migrated into your proxmox environment now I recommend you go and create a new virtual machine and I'll get on to that in a minute and walk you through it but there will be other times when you want to import a virtual machine specifically on the sofas XG installation where they provide you with not an ISO but a handy hard disk image so it's really quick to spin that up so the first thing we're going to want to do to migrate hyper-v over to proxmox is to go to your hyper-v manager you want to stop the virtual machine that's running you want to look at the checkpoints and make sure you delete all of the checkpoints now that sounds scary but deleting the checkpoint merges it so it basically brings up the latest snapshot and bakes it into the hard drive image therefore you only have one image and it's the most recent otherwise if you don't do this when you export it you'll have lots of incremental little hard drive files and you can't import that in proxbox so when you delete those snapshots you'll end up with a single virtual hard drive image I think it's dot vdx file for for hyperfee now what you need to do you need to export that somewhere safe you need to load up your winscp as we did in the last video you want to follow exactly the same procedure but this time you want to create a new site you want to connect to your proxmox IP address and you want to log in now I'll show you on screen you need to navigate to a certain folder this is the folder that I use this folder won't be present on yours but feel free to create it it's exactly the same way we created the folder for nginx in the previous video and we simply want to drag and drop the exported virtual hard drive image onto our proxmox node once that's copied we need to create a new virtual machine to do that click create VM in the top right hand corner it's the blue button this will create a pop-up on that pop-up you'll have the node name in this case you should only have one node mindset proxbox Asus you'll have a VM ID that's pre-populated this number is important for the command you're going to run next time so do take note don't worry if you don't take note it will be displayed on the left hand side as you can see in my video typically the first one you create will start with a hundred you can then give the virtual machine a name you may want to call this one Docker once you've done that click next which will take you onto the OS tab as we're going to be importing a hard drive with an operating system that's already installed we don't need to install an OS so click do not use any media and click next for the system leave everything as default we'll come on to this later when we create a new VM about what those options mean for disks keep it as is you can alter the size if you wish for the CPU change this to the number of cores that you want to assign to the virtual machine if you only have one socket like most of your consumer grade gear will have then leave that as one for Network leave the defaults for now you can always change that later and then hit finish you'll see on the left hand side now that you have a new VM populated it will have a gray question mark and then after a few seconds it should turn to a gray computer screen you're now ready to go to the console and import the VM to the virtual machine that you just created once completed go to the hardware tab on that virtual machine you created click on the hard drive and click edit and you want to assign that to scuzzy zero once you've assigned that click on the options and then you want to change the boot device to use that hard drive you just created once that's done simply click Start and you should have a fully operational virtual machine exactly the same as though it was running in hyper-v okay so let's get on to the bit that you're probably most excited for let's go and create a first VM in proxbox the process is pretty much identical to what we just did with the disk import we need to create a VM first this is the template by clicking in the top right hand corner however now that we're creating a new virtual machine I want to take you through a few more of the options and explain what some of them actually mean one thing to note create CT now those are separate things those create Linux containers we're not going to go into that in this session but do be aware that they exist and we'll have a think about why they might be useful so when you click create VM you're presented with the first page of the wizard complete this in the same way that you did for importing the VM previously on the next page you start to select the operating system so in this case you would select where it's stored so you'd collect the storage as you can see mine defaults to the true Nas so I've actually got my true Nas mounted into proxmox so I can use that for ISO storage which is really useful and we can touch on that later if you want to go down that route next you select the iso image so this is very similar to what we did in hyper-v so let's go and click the drop down oh wait it's empty well that's right it's a fresh installation we haven't put an ISO on there well if we go and look at the storage on the Node and click on the iso tab we'll see that it's blank however you'll see two options what's really handy is we can download directly from the URL so if you click download from the URL you could go to the Ubuntu Server website you could right click the the download now button copy the URL and simply paste it into the top bar hit query and you'll get the file name and then you'll just click download it'll go and download that in the background once it's done that'll then be able to be selected from the previous VM creation wizard however because we downloaded the iso in the previous video there's a quicker way and you'll notice the button next to it says upload so if you click upload simply select the ISO file that we downloaded previously that will then be uploaded to the proxbox node at your network speed or hard drive speed or whatever your limiting factor is so you should get well over 100 Megs per second when that completes just simply close down the dialog box and go back to creating your VM fill in the same details as before and now when you get to that OS tab you'll be able to select your local storage and then you should see the ISO file as an option so simply click that and we can move on to the next step you will notice that there is the guest OS type and it will say Linux and you've got options for I think Solaris and windows now if you're going to deploy a Windows Virtual Machine on here then obviously you would change that to be windows that opens up different kernel operations in the background different parameters and makes it smoother more optimized for the environment that you're running the next options are the system options now we're going to leave those all as the default because that will work for what we want to do however do note that Q35 is going to be used in future videos now Q35 is fundamentally different to the default C bios that we're going to use and is recommended if you want to do Hardware pass through to Virtual machines we're not going to touch on that in this video but it's something we will cover in later video the next window is going to give you your hard drive options much like in hyper-v you can select how big you want to make that drive and where you want to store that drive so in the event I've got here I'm actually storing some of my slower virtual machines the ones that don't need high input output I store that on my trueness server because I've got about 100 terabytes that I can use on the next page you'll see the CPU options on the right hand side as well importantly you can change the type of processor so what this effectively means is you're telling the virtual machine effectively what Hardware it can use so for example CPUs will have a number of Hardware accelerators built into them instruction sets Etc depending on what you select allows the VMS to take advantage of those which can greatly speed up certain computational tasks what I recommend you do for this is if you scroll to the bottom you'll see host and what that will do is it'll give that virtual machine all of the instructions on your CPU so it will basically give it full functionality memory is pretty straightforward you simply key in the amount of memory you want to give to the virtual machine Network we're not going to change anything from the default here because this will allow you to explore your network and access services but in the future we'll be coming back to here to make advanced changes to networking we'll be putting in a bridge and we'll actually be making sure we give it its own Mac address its own IP address and we'll also be touching on vlans so once you go on to the next stream you simply hit confirm and you're away you'll see that on the left hand column your new VM is being created and when you click on that virtual machine you'll be presented with the summary tab for that individual virtual machine again you're going to see things like the CPU usage the memory usage the disk usage Etc so one thing to check once you've created your virtual machine if you just go to the options Tab and you check the boot order just make sure that the scuzzy zero Drive is selected as your first so that's your hard drive if it is you're good to go and you can simply go to the console option in the menu if you click that that's the same as in hyper-v where we clicked connect and you can launch the virtual machine by clicking start now you can also in sort of the upper right corner here where we created a VM there's also separate menu options there for starting stopping suspending much like in hyper-v and there you have it you have your Ubuntu Server running in proxmox now you can go ahead and reinstall Docker as you did before and spin up those services in the next video we're going to be discussing firewalls I'm going to be talking about what they are what purposes serve and why you should consider getting one we'll need a firewall as we start to include more services on our Docker installation and certainly when we're looking to expose those services to the internet we'll want to make sure that they're on their own dedicated VLAN that is separate from our home trusted devices and we'll also want to have a look at some of the security features that we can enable to make sure that any traffic that's coming in is filtered and scanned before it hits those boxes we'll also need to be looking at putting them behind a proxy but I'm getting ahead of ourselves the next video is going to look at firewalls and what your options are see you then [Music]

Channel: Jim's Garage

Views: 11,537

Keywords: Proxmox, homelab, guide, linux, 2023

Id: jNEjKdtMrZI

Length: 21min 22sec (1282 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2023