<b>Hey everybody, welcome back to Jim's</b> <b>Garage. This is the second</b> <b>video in the new Homelab series</b> <b>where we're going to be deploying Proxmox</b> <b>onto our Homelab device</b> <b>and I'm going to talk you</b> <b>through all of the steps as well as some</b> <b>of the recommendations</b> <b>that I have for the device you</b> <b>might want to use and also the</b> <b>configuration of Proxmox itself. I'll</b> <b>also show you how to deploy</b> <b>your first virtual machine as well as an</b> <b>LXC and some of the other</b> <b>configuration options you might</b> <b>want to consider. Now in the previous</b> <b>video I gave you some options</b> <b>around some devices I recommend</b> <b>but I also spoke about some of the things</b> <b>that you should look for</b> <b>when creating a Homelab device,</b> <b>be it one that you've already got, i.e.</b>
<b>an old device, one that</b> <b>you may be building for new,</b> <b>a second-hand enterprise server or</b> <b>something off the shelf. Now the</b> <b>requirements for Proxmox are</b> <b>pretty lightweight anyway but obviously</b> <b>if you want to run more on</b> <b>this you want to have more</b> <b>provisioning, i.e. more cores, more RAM,</b> <b>more storage space. Some</b> <b>of the devices I showed in</b> <b>the previous video were very much bare</b> <b>bones so if you are using</b> <b>one of those devices do note</b> <b>that you might run out of some of those</b> <b>and it could limit what</b> <b>you can actually run on your</b> <b>Homelab server. Obviously something with</b>
<b>an upgrade path, more RAM</b> <b>slots, more storage space,</b> <b>more CPU etc you're going to be able to</b> <b>do more with your Homelab.</b> <b>But to prove a point I'm going</b> <b>to use what I would consider the sort of</b> <b>bare minimum. I'm going to</b> <b>use a Mele device that I've</b> <b>used in a previous video. It's only got</b> <b>four cores it's using the</b> <b>newest Intel N150, it's got 16</b> <b>gigabytes of RAM and a one terabyte NVMe.</b>
<b>Ideally you'd probably want to get</b> <b>something with at least</b> <b>sort of eight cores or at least four</b> <b>cores and hyper threading. 16 gigs is</b> <b>okay to get you started</b> <b>but 32 is probably a good spot if you</b> <b>want to be hosting some additional</b> <b>services, additional</b> <b>virtual machines etc and I would</b> <b>recommend having two network interface</b> <b>cards. That can be really</b> <b>handy and it gives you the option to</b> <b>easily set up things like a virtual</b> <b>firewall and also having</b> <b>the ability to have more NVMe drives in</b> <b>there is pretty cool as well.</b> <b>You could either mirror your</b> <b>boot drive and use that single mirror to</b> <b>actually host the operating</b> <b>system for Proxmox itself as</b> <b>well as all the virtual machines. That</b> <b>does give you some redundancy because</b> <b>there isn't an official</b> <b>way to back up Proxmox albeit you will</b> <b>find unofficial ones</b> <b>with copying certain folder</b> <b>structures on the hypervisor itself. Now</b>
<b>there are a few ways to</b> <b>actually install Proxmox.</b> <b>There's an automatic installer where you</b> <b>can create a configuration</b> <b>file and it will automatically</b> <b>install it. That's good in a headless</b> <b>environment i.e where you don't have say</b> <b>a GPU or you need to</b> <b>have remote access to the system. You can</b> <b>also do it through a</b> <b>network boot as well but I'm going</b> <b>to take the easy option which is what I</b> <b>recommend and kind of what</b> <b>I'm aiming this series at and</b> <b>that'll be that more traditional method</b> <b>of downloading the ISO.</b>
<b>In this case it's going</b> <b>to be 8.4-1 from the official website</b> <b>we're going to hit</b> <b>download and download the ISO.</b> <b>You will need to burn this to a USB</b> <b>stick. Now there are other</b>
<b>ways to do this as I mentioned</b> <b>but they are more involved and I might</b> <b>cover that in a later video. You will</b> <b>also notice here that</b> <b>there is Proxmox backup server. I do have</b> <b>an existing video on</b> <b>that that is still relevant</b> <b>so I recommend you go and check that out</b> <b>if you want to be able</b> <b>to back up your virtual</b> <b>machines your LXCs etc after you've</b> <b>installed Proxmox. So once you've</b> <b>downloaded the ISO file</b> <b>we're going to need to burn that to a USB</b> <b>stick. Now there are</b>
<b>multiple ways to burn this ISO file</b> <b>to a USB stick. The tool that I like to</b> <b>use is called Rufus so you</b> <b>can just head to the Rufus</b> <b>website and download this but other</b> <b>alternatives include things</b> <b>like Etcher. It doesn't really</b> <b>matter which one you use just choose</b> <b>which one you like. Now the</b> <b>key thing is this is going to</b> <b>wipe the USB stick because it's going to</b> <b>need to partition it when</b> <b>it copies over the ISO file.</b> <b>So in my case I just simply need to click</b> <b>select, select the ISO file</b> <b>that I want, hit OK and then</b> <b>that's pretty much it. I should be able</b> <b>to hit start. Now it's going</b>
<b>to remind me again that it's</b> <b>going to destroy everything on this</b> <b>device and that's okay and then it's</b> <b>going to go away and</b> <b>actually install that onto the USB stick.</b> <b>Now whilst this is right in</b> <b>that image it's worth pointing</b> <b>out that Proxmox is not the only</b> <b>hypervisor that you can use. There are</b> <b>lots out there. For example</b> <b>you can actually use a hypervisor on your</b> <b>Windows machine. That's</b> <b>available on Pro and above I</b> <b>believe. I do have a video on that but if</b> <b>you're going down the</b> <b>home lab route I definitely</b> <b>recommend having something like a</b> <b>dedicated machine that you</b> <b>can install Proxmox on. Other</b>
<b>things to note are you can actually use</b> <b>things like Trunaz or Unraid as a</b> <b>hypervisor albeit I tend</b> <b>to use those just for storage. Another</b> <b>notable or at least it was notable was</b> <b>something like vSphere</b> <b>before it was bastardized by Broadcom. My</b> <b>understanding is that</b> <b>they are going to create</b> <b>another free tier for that but a lot of</b> <b>those bridges have</b> <b>already been burned within the</b> <b>community. So I generally recommend</b> <b>Proxmox. It's definitely the</b> <b>most popular one in the home lab</b> <b>space and I've had a great experience</b> <b>with it over the past few years. In fact</b> <b>I actually have three</b> <b>machines all running Proxmox in a</b> <b>cluster. I'll come on to that</b>
<b>later but if you want to skip</b> <b>ahead I've already got videos on that.</b> <b>Now once this has written it</b> <b>to the drive you're okay to</b> <b>close this down but you're probably</b> <b>thinking now well how do I actually get</b> <b>this onto the device</b> <b>what is it that I need to do? Well I'm</b> <b>going to assume that you've</b> <b>just got a bare-bones setup.</b> <b>What I mean by that is you've got your</b> <b>ISP router, you've got the machine like</b> <b>me that I'm recording</b> <b>this video on and then you've got another</b> <b>device that you're looking</b> <b>to install your first Proxmox</b> <b>onto. Now that device quite simply you</b>
<b>just want to plug that into your ISP</b> <b>router that should pick</b> <b>up an IP address via DHCP and you should</b> <b>be good to go. Now you don't</b> <b>technically need to give it</b> <b>internet access to undo the installer but</b> <b>you're obviously going to</b> <b>need to have network access to</b> <b>get onto that device post installation.</b> <b>One thing that's important for doing it</b> <b>this route is to have</b> <b>a GPU or an iGPU hence why I gave it so</b> <b>much attention in the</b> <b>previous video. Now you can do</b> <b>it without a GPU. Sometimes certain</b> <b>devices have things like IPMI whereby</b> <b>it's able to send the</b> <b>output of the machine over the network</b> <b>and you can view that but having</b> <b>something like an integrated</b> <b>GPU is a great start because you can</b> <b>simply plug in an HDMI cable like you</b> <b>would normally do and</b> <b>you'll just get this as output to a</b> <b>monitor. If you're using</b> <b>something like an AMD system that</b> <b>you've built yourself a lot of the time</b> <b>those CPUs don't come with an</b> <b>iGPU so you will actually have</b> <b>to use a discrete GPU for that</b> <b>installation process but you can remove</b> <b>that post installation</b> <b>because you'll be connecting to this</b> <b>thing through the web</b> <b>browser anyway or backup via SSH.</b>
<b>So now with your machine plugged in it's</b> <b>time to boot it up and we want to enter</b> <b>the BIOS to begin with.</b> <b>This is important because we need to make</b> <b>sure that we've got the</b> <b>right boot option selected.</b> <b>By default it's probably going to boot to</b> <b>the hard drive that the device was set up</b> <b>or came pre-configured with.</b> <b>Now the BIOS for your machine is going to</b> <b>be different depending on</b> <b>motherboard manufacturer,</b> <b>feature set, chipset, CPU etc. There's a</b>
<b>myriad of things but</b> <b>there's some common things that we</b> <b>want to look out for. Now on an Intel</b> <b>machine we want to be looking</b> <b>for things like VTX and VTD.</b> <b>Those want to be enabled. So on my</b> <b>machine this was on the VTD section here</b> <b>you can see that that's</b> <b>enabled and I've also got VTX enabled as</b> <b>well in another section in</b> <b>the BIOS. The next thing really</b> <b>you want to have a look at is to go to</b> <b>the boot section and here you can see</b> <b>that I've got Ubuntu</b> <b>installed from when I tested this device</b> <b>and the boot option too is</b> <b>that UFE USB drive that I just</b> <b>installed Proxmox 2. So what we need to</b>
<b>do is basically swap these</b> <b>around so that the first boot</b> <b>device is actually the USB device. On</b> <b>some machines as well you also get the</b> <b>option to fast boot and</b> <b>you can boot that from a different device</b> <b>without having to change</b> <b>these settings. I'm just going to</b> <b>change this now just to make it easier</b> <b>and make it permanent. Do remember in the</b> <b>future though if you</b> <b>plug in a USB device it might try to boot</b> <b>off that so you might want</b> <b>to swap these around again</b> <b>but effectively all we need to do now is</b> <b>click save changes and exit.</b>
<b>That should save it, reboot</b> <b>the device and now hopefully as you can</b> <b>see it's now trying to boot</b> <b>into Proxmox. Now I'm going to</b> <b>talk you through sort of a beginner setup</b> <b>for Proxmox but do go</b> <b>and read the documentation.</b> <b>There's a ton of other options. This</b> <b>should be able to get you up</b> <b>and running without too many</b> <b>issues but once you do start to get down</b> <b>this path and get more</b> <b>familiar you might want to revisit</b> <b>it. If we have a look at the advanced</b> <b>options you can see that there's</b> <b>automated installations</b> <b>which I mentioned before. There's also</b>
<b>some memory testing and some firmware</b> <b>settings. If you've got</b> <b>say a secondhand server from eBay or</b> <b>something you may wish to run a memory</b> <b>test first to make sure</b> <b>that all of your memory is performing as</b> <b>expected otherwise you</b> <b>could get some crashes or bad</b> <b>behavior once you're going through it.</b> <b>Now we're going to go through the</b> <b>graphical output just</b> <b>because it's easier with a graphic</b> <b>interface. Now it's going to boot</b>
<b>actually into the installer</b> <b>and we're going to go through the setup</b> <b>wizard to get this up and</b> <b>running. Now once this is booted</b> <b>we have to agree to the Euler and then we</b> <b>need to choose which</b> <b>device we want to install it on.</b> <b>Now because this is a cheap device and it</b> <b>only has one NVMe slot you</b> <b>can see here that I've only</b> <b>got this one option. If you have more</b> <b>than one device you will be</b> <b>able to click on the option</b> <b>selection here and you'll be able to</b> <b>choose how you want this set</b> <b>up. So for example you can set</b> <b>this up as ZFS and you've got various</b> <b>different ways to do RAID</b> <b>and also BTRFS. This would then</b>
<b>give you the opportunity to configure and</b> <b>set up and install this to</b> <b>a RAID. That would mean that</b> <b>in my instance I've only got one drive if</b> <b>that fails I lose</b> <b>everything but if you have a mirrored</b> <b>drive a redundant pair if one of those</b> <b>drives failed it would</b> <b>simply be using the other drive</b> <b>and you could replace it and keep your</b> <b>data. That is definitely</b> <b>something to bear in mind but if</b> <b>you're just starting out in the homelab</b> <b>space and you've only got a</b> <b>small device with one drive</b> <b>you should be fine because by the end of</b> <b>this we are going to be setting up a</b> <b>3-2-1 backup strategy.</b> <b>So worst case is you'll lose whatever it</b> <b>is between now and your</b> <b>last backup but to be honest if</b> <b>you're backing up regularly that should</b> <b>be less of an issue. In the</b>
<b>future you'll probably want to go</b> <b>and add another drive in here make a raid</b> <b>rebuild your cluster etc and we can</b> <b>discuss that later on</b> <b>in the video series. But for now I'm just</b> <b>going to use this hard drive here and I'm</b> <b>going to click next.</b> <b>It's automatically detected where I am</b> <b>just due to having this plugged in</b> <b>and then it's going to ask me to create a</b> <b>password to log in.</b> <b>This will be the actual</b> <b>administrative console password the one</b> <b>that we'll be logging into through the</b> <b>web browser in a moment.</b> <b>So with those details entered we should</b> <b>be able to click next and then it's</b> <b>asking us what do we</b> <b>want as our management interface. Now</b>
<b>again on most of these</b> <b>devices if you're just getting a</b> <b>bare-bones device or an old machine it's</b> <b>probably only going to have</b> <b>one network card one network</b> <b>interface. This one actually has the</b> <b>wired one the one that I'm</b> <b>using you see it's green and it</b> <b>also has a wireless one. Obviously don't</b> <b>recommend using wireless</b> <b>because of the dropouts etc</b> <b>interference which can make</b> <b>administration a pain and also</b> <b>connections between VMs and your</b> <b>network etc pretty flaky. But also I</b>
<b>mentioned in previous video that you</b> <b>might want to add in</b> <b>additional network interface cards. Now</b> <b>that's where it gets quite</b> <b>interesting you can choose</b> <b>then to have dedicated network cards just</b> <b>for the administration</b> <b>of Proxmox itself which in</b> <b>a more sort of production setup is what</b> <b>you would have. You would</b> <b>likely have a dedicated interface</b> <b>card that is specifically for the</b> <b>administration of Proxmox and then you</b> <b>would put all of your</b> <b>containers VMs etc onto different network</b> <b>cards. That also gives you</b>
<b>the ability to have different</b> <b>network cards i.e. different performance</b> <b>based upon the</b> <b>requirements. Just for administration</b> <b>of Proxmox you really don't need anything</b> <b>fancy a one gig is more</b> <b>than enough but you might wish</b> <b>to get a cheap say Mellanox card or</b> <b>something else a 10 gig card</b> <b>and assign that just for your</b> <b>virtual machine so all of your virtual</b> <b>machines get snappy access to your</b> <b>network. In this scenario</b> <b>here where I'm choosing the default what</b> <b>this means is it's</b> <b>basically going to bridge the</b> <b>Proxmox interface and all of my virtual</b> <b>machines on that same</b> <b>network host. Like I say fine for a</b> <b>home lab not very productiony but it's</b> <b>enough to get you guys started. So</b> <b>depending on what you've</b> <b>got you choose how you want to set this</b> <b>up just remember which</b> <b>interface card you're using. Now</b>
<b>you can also give this a fully qualified</b> <b>domain name so for</b> <b>example I could just call this</b> <b>Proxmox.jimsgarage.co.uk you could choose</b> <b>whatever you wanted on</b> <b>yours as well based upon</b> <b>what you've got. This will be useful in</b> <b>the future because you'll be able to</b> <b>identify your machine etc</b> <b>and you'll be able to use this in the</b> <b>future to actually access this through</b> <b>the web browser etc.</b> <b>Now the IP address here is actually</b> <b>picked up through DHCP on</b> <b>my router and you'll probably</b> <b>have a similar setup if you're plugging</b> <b>this into your ISP router. You can</b> <b>obviously create a static</b> <b>map as well on your router if you wanted</b> <b>to so reserve an IP</b> <b>address. I generally recommend for</b>
<b>things like a management interface that</b> <b>you do do that because you</b> <b>want to make sure that your</b> <b>network interface isn't always changing</b> <b>because often when you need</b> <b>to log in stuff it's always</b> <b>the time at which things change and it</b> <b>can be a pain to get back</b> <b>up and running. So for this</b> <b>demonstration I'm just going to be</b> <b>running this on 9.109 and I've also set</b> <b>up my DNS server here</b> <b>which is actually my piehole. This will</b> <b>probably be picked up if you're just</b> <b>using your ISP router</b> <b>as your ISP router's DNS resolver but you</b> <b>could put in here for</b> <b>example 1.1.1.1 for something like</b>
<b>Cloudflare but it's up to you. You can</b> <b>also change all of these</b> <b>settings at a later date.</b> <b>So if we hit next we should get into now</b> <b>confirmation and</b> <b>installation. So it's basically</b>
<b>confirming everything we've just set up</b> <b>in the wizard and we're going to</b> <b>automatically reboot</b> <b>after a successful installation. So I'm</b> <b>ready to hit install and</b> <b>now that should be going away,</b> <b>should be formatting the drives etc and</b> <b>then it should be installing</b> <b>Proxmox to that single NVMe</b> <b>drive I've got on the machine. Once this</b> <b>is done it's going to reboot</b> <b>and I'll see you back on the</b> <b>other side once it's booted Proxmox for</b> <b>the first time. One thing</b> <b>to bear in mind and this is</b> <b>probably a bit advanced at this stage but</b> <b>is to understand the kernel</b> <b>version that you're running</b> <b>on Proxmox. Now basically the higher the</b> <b>Proxmox version the newer the</b> <b>kernel and for the uninitiated</b> <b>the kernel is essentially the bit of the</b> <b>computer, the code that actually talks</b> <b>between the operating</b> <b>system and the underlying hardware. So it</b>
<b>gives things like the OS</b> <b>access to the graphics card.</b> <b>Now in my instance and from my testing in</b> <b>a previous video the</b> <b>actual iGPU in the N150</b> <b>is too new for kernel 6.8. I believe you</b> <b>need kernel 6.11. It's not</b>
<b>so much an issue for Proxmox</b> <b>itself because we're not going to allow</b> <b>Proxmox to use the iGPU but</b> <b>when you're installing say a</b> <b>new virtual machine and I'll touch again</b> <b>on this later in case you</b> <b>skipped ahead. When you install</b> <b>say a version of Ubuntu don't use</b> <b>something like 2404 and expect it to</b> <b>work. You can use 2404 but</b> <b>you'll have to update to at least</b> <b>something like 6.11 kernel</b> <b>otherwise the GPU just won't be</b> <b>recognized and you can't use it for</b> <b>pass-through. I'll reference</b> <b>my previous video because that</b> <b>process is still relevant. I'm not going</b>
<b>to have time in this video</b> <b>to do iGPU pass-through but I</b> <b>will speak about the bits that you need</b> <b>to look out for. So now the</b> <b>machine is rebooting it should</b> <b>now start up and because I've unplugged</b> <b>the USB drive it should</b> <b>automatically fail over now to</b> <b>that second one. Here you go it's picked</b> <b>up Proxmox and in two seconds</b> <b>it should automatically start</b> <b>booting into Proxmox itself. Now as I</b>
<b>mentioned before Proxmox is</b> <b>command line interface when</b> <b>you just plug an HDMI in. We're actually</b> <b>going to be accessing this</b> <b>through the web browser on my</b> <b>current machine i.e. the one I'm</b> <b>currently recording this</b> <b>video on. So now here you can see</b> <b>that we've got the IP address, HTTPS</b> <b>9.109.port 8006 and that's what we need</b> <b>to connect to now in the</b> <b>web browser. Now we can also log in via</b> <b>the command line interface and this is</b> <b>good to know in case</b> <b>ever you've got any issues you should be</b> <b>able to log into here and resolve</b> <b>anything. So for instance</b>
<b>if I log in with root and I put in the</b> <b>password that I set during the</b> <b>installation. If I hit return</b> <b>you can see that I'm now actually logged</b> <b>in and just like I</b> <b>mentioned before if ever you've used</b> <b>Linux Proxmox is just installed onto</b> <b>Debian 12 Bookworm. So now</b> <b>you've got basically all the</b> <b>things you would expect from a standard</b> <b>Linux installation. So I'm</b> <b>going to exit this and now</b> <b>we're going to navigate to the IP address</b> <b>at the top of the screen via</b> <b>our browser. So if we go back</b> <b>now to the browser that we actually</b> <b>downloaded the ISO from and we put in the</b> <b>address that we saw.</b>
<b>So in my instance that 9.109 colon 8006</b> <b>remember it's HTTPS we</b> <b>should be able to reach the web</b> <b>interface for Proxmox. Now you're likely</b> <b>to get a certificate</b> <b>warning but don't worry about that</b> <b>it's because it's using a self-signed</b> <b>certificate but one that isn't</b> <b>valid i.e trusted. So we want</b> <b>to hit advanced and we want to click</b> <b>proceed and then we should get to the</b> <b>login for Proxmox. Now</b>
<b>just like I logged into the CLI we'll use</b> <b>the same credentials so</b> <b>it will be root and then it</b> <b>will be the password during the</b> <b>installation. You can obviously opt to</b> <b>save the username and also</b> <b>just getting ahead of ourselves you can</b> <b>use different</b> <b>authentication servers if you want a</b> <b>more advanced setup we're not going to do</b> <b>that in this video. So</b> <b>we'll hit login it's going to</b> <b>complain that we don't have a valid</b> <b>subscription that's because</b> <b>Proxmox comes in two flavors</b> <b>basically the free version that we're</b> <b>using but there's also an</b> <b>enterprise one which gets regular</b> <b>patching and security updates we're going</b> <b>to hit okay you can also</b> <b>disable that warning if you want</b> <b>later on. So now the default as soon as</b> <b>we get in here we can see</b> <b>that we're on the data center tab</b> <b>and it's basically given us all the</b> <b>information about our Proxmox</b> <b>installation this is technically</b> <b>our cluster but we only have a cluster of</b> <b>one machine so this is</b> <b>basically a summary of just</b> <b>this one machine. If you look at my more</b>
<b>recent videos and stuff</b> <b>I've done on the channel you'll</b> <b>know that I actually have three of these</b> <b>machines in what's known as a</b> <b>cluster and that allows me to</b> <b>do cool stuff like move VMs between</b> <b>different machines the</b> <b>benefit of that is I can take down</b> <b>one machine for maintenance and then move</b> <b>all of my production stuff</b> <b>all of my VMs etc onto a machine</b> <b>that isn't being taken down and it also</b> <b>does that automatically not</b> <b>manually so again it makes the</b> <b>management of my systems pretty</b> <b>straightforward. So just looking through</b> <b>the data center itself</b> <b>you'll see a summary of the machine and</b> <b>what's on it at the moment</b> <b>you can see that we've got</b> <b>basically zero CPU usage it's using about</b> <b>10% of my memory and pretty</b> <b>much 1% of the storage. Very</b> <b>lightweight very minimalist just to get</b> <b>Proxmox up and running and</b> <b>like I said before this is only</b> <b>a quad core CPU with 16 gigs of RAM. Now</b> <b>if we did have a cluster we</b> <b>could have a look at all the</b> <b>cluster things here and if you do want to</b> <b>add another machine in</b> <b>the future to join a cluster</b> <b>it's as simple as creating a cluster</b> <b>first and then getting the join</b> <b>information going on to</b> <b>that second machine and then adding it to</b> <b>that machine and once</b> <b>you've clicked join basically</b> <b>within a few minutes you should then be</b> <b>able to see both through one user</b> <b>interface. You can see</b> <b>my video around how I've got this</b> <b>configured I'll link that now also Ceph</b> <b>and this is very much</b> <b>aligned to setting up that cluster. Ceph</b>
<b>I've covered extensively</b> <b>on my channel where I run</b> <b>three MSO1s for my cluster. Ceph is the</b> <b>distributed storage that</b> <b>allows me to do that hot failover</b> <b>between my virtual machines. That's</b> <b>because all of the nodes that are in my</b> <b>cluster all share the</b> <b>same Ceph storage. This is kind of a</b> <b>decentralized storage each one has a</b> <b>replica of each of the</b> <b>other's data they all basically replicate</b> <b>in real time so that a</b> <b>machine doesn't really care where</b> <b>it is because it's got access to all the</b> <b>up-to-date data. You can also check out</b>
<b>the storage here and</b> <b>you can also add new storage it supports</b> <b>lots of different storages.</b> <b>You'll also notice here that</b> <b>we can have that Proxmox backup server so</b> <b>we can actually set that up</b> <b>as server. I've got a video</b> <b>on that as well if you want to go and</b> <b>check that out that's still</b> <b>valid. Other things that are</b> <b>probably more relevant to you when you're</b> <b>just starting out you may</b> <b>have a NAS I'll be covering</b> <b>that in a future video so some network</b> <b>attached storage. You can</b>
<b>actually mount NAS storage within</b> <b>Proxmox itself and even then assign that</b> <b>over to virtual machines</b> <b>etc and you can use that</b> <b>specifically for backing up virtual</b> <b>machines manually. To do</b> <b>backups you'd want to create a</b> <b>backup schedule in here and specify which</b> <b>storage you want to use. Most of the</b> <b>other things in here</b> <b>like replication for example need at</b> <b>least two nodes so we can't</b> <b>do that. High availability is</b>
<b>basically the same as well that's what's</b> <b>going to allow you to have</b> <b>multiple nodes within a cluster</b> <b>and then basically if you assign it as</b> <b>highly available it will</b> <b>try to make sure that if one</b> <b>of those nodes goes down it puts it onto</b> <b>the other node to make it highly</b> <b>available. Other things</b> <b>that are in here really we've got some</b> <b>software defined networking</b> <b>stuff which I've done a video</b> <b>on. I probably need to update that it's</b> <b>quite old now and I didn't</b> <b>really go and scratch the surface</b> <b>on that one but what that will allow you</b> <b>to do is basically create</b> <b>software defined networks</b> <b>within Proxmox itself basically like</b> <b>another virtual switch</b> <b>layer etc. There is a firewall</b> <b>as well software firewall within Proxmox</b> <b>that you can use to add some</b> <b>additional rules and security.</b> <b>Don't really find that I need it because</b> <b>I tend to basically route</b> <b>everything through my router</b> <b>but that is an option especially if</b> <b>you're going down sort of a more</b> <b>virtualized route. Other things</b> <b>that are useful but I'm not going to</b> <b>cover in this video are users so you can</b> <b>add multiple users to</b> <b>Proxmox. You could add somebody else so</b>
<b>you want to say be an admin.</b> <b>You can get API tokens as well</b> <b>for your cluster if you're going to plug</b> <b>this into something else.</b> <b>You can set up two-factor</b> <b>authentication, put users in groups, look</b> <b>at pools etc. Give people</b> <b>different roles so when you create</b> <b>a user you have to specify which roles</b> <b>that they've got on your</b> <b>cluster. Obviously this is</b> <b>very much more sort of in the production</b> <b>space not for a home lab but</b> <b>it's great that you get all of</b> <b>these tools to play with and learn from.</b>
<b>So enough of the overview of</b> <b>this let's have a look at the</b> <b>actual node we've got. Remember this is</b> <b>the data center so this is</b> <b>the specific machine that I</b> <b>actually installed Proxmox on and if we</b> <b>go to the summary we should</b> <b>now see that we've got that four</b> <b>times cause for the Intel N150 and we've</b> <b>got 16 gigs of RAM and it's</b> <b>showing 100 gigs of storage</b> <b>space that's the default that the</b> <b>partition size for Proxmox is but if we</b> <b>actually go down on the</b> <b>left here for the disks we should be able</b> <b>to click on the disks and we</b> <b>can see this one here. Actually</b> <b>it's only half a terabyte not a full</b> <b>terabyte but what that means is we've</b> <b>basically got about 400</b> <b>gigs for all of our virtual machines and</b> <b>containers. So similarly if we have a</b>
<b>quick look through the</b> <b>user interface here you'll see that when</b> <b>we click on one of our</b> <b>machines we get this log down here</b> <b>this is going to show us everything</b> <b>that's going on on the Proxmox host. So</b> <b>for example when you</b> <b>create a virtual machine when you start</b> <b>it up when you shut it down all of that</b> <b>you'll get a nice log</b> <b>here and you can also display more</b> <b>granular detail if you click on the</b> <b>system log here it will show</b> <b>you basically everything that's going on.</b> <b>The cool thing with Proxmox as well is</b> <b>that you can actually</b> <b>have a shell into that machine so before</b> <b>we actually dialed in</b> <b>physically to the machine</b> <b>but here we're using a SSH connection</b> <b>over onto that machine so we</b> <b>can do that as well. You'll</b> <b>also notice now that we have all of the</b> <b>system settings so for</b> <b>example here we'll see the network</b> <b>if you remember back to the installation</b> <b>we had that EMP1S0 that's</b> <b>the physical RJ45 port on this</b> <b>machine and we also had that wireless</b> <b>over here as well which isn't enabled.</b> <b>Now what happens when</b> <b>you install this is it creates a virtual</b> <b>bridge to that physical NIC</b> <b>and when we actually install</b> <b>virtual machines by default it will</b> <b>install it to that VMBR0. We</b> <b>can create additional bridges</b> <b>so we could create another one it</b> <b>automatically enumerates it</b> <b>one higher we can then specify</b> <b>basically the IP address and all of that</b> <b>sort of stuff and then we</b> <b>can assign it to a bridge port</b> <b>we can make it VLAN aware etc. Now you do</b>
<b>need to assign each VMBR each virtual</b> <b>bridge to a physical</b> <b>bridge so we can't actually add another</b> <b>one to this and do note that</b> <b>if you are going to be doing</b> <b>anything with VLANs and I'll come on to</b> <b>that in future videos you will need to</b> <b>make this VLAN aware.</b> <b>If you don't make it VLAN aware when you</b> <b>try and put a virtual</b> <b>machine onto a VLAN the actual VLAN</b> <b>tags won't get passed on it won't</b> <b>understand it and thus you won't get a</b> <b>valid network address</b> <b>you won't get any networking on that</b> <b>device. Certificas are</b> <b>basically where we can add</b> <b>certificates to this machine this is most</b> <b>handy for when you're</b> <b>doing SSH connections to this</b> <b>some of my videos where I've used Ansible</b> <b>to deploy two proxmocks</b> <b>it will use a certificate</b> <b>to connect to it for security reasons and</b> <b>you can here basically</b> <b>specify your own certificate</b> <b>if you want to. DNS is that DNS that I</b> <b>set up during installation</b> <b>you can edit this add more</b> <b>DNS servers if you want to. The host file</b> <b>again similarly is going</b> <b>to show you the host file on</b> <b>this machine you may have to change this</b> <b>if you have some network</b> <b>changes. The updates tab is</b> <b>important and this is basically where you</b> <b>update this machine so if</b> <b>we actually click refresh for</b> <b>the first time and click ok it's going to</b> <b>go away to the Debian</b> <b>repository as well as the proxmocks</b> <b>ones and once that's completed it should</b> <b>show us all the packages</b> <b>that are available for us.</b>
<b>Now as I've just installed this hopefully</b> <b>there aren't too many</b> <b>but even with a fresh install you can see</b> <b>that we've got these</b> <b>packages that are available.</b> <b>To upgrade it's as simple as just hitting</b> <b>the upgrade do bear in</b> <b>mind that a lot of these</b> <b>you will have to restart your hypervisor</b> <b>i.e. proxmocks so if you</b> <b>are running something do bear</b> <b>in mind that it might need to reboot.</b>
<b>Also if you go down the route of</b> <b>installing something like a</b> <b>virtual firewall which I've got videos on</b> <b>as well when you do reboot your</b> <b>hypervisor you're obviously</b> <b>going to be rebooting your firewall as</b> <b>well so that will knock out</b> <b>your network. If we go down</b> <b>to the disks you'll see the disks in here</b> <b>like I mentioned earlier</b> <b>and then you can also see sort</b> <b>of the virtual partitions you've got on</b> <b>there the lvm's the</b> <b>different directories which you can</b> <b>create as well and also zfs if you</b> <b>created that earlier but we</b> <b>know that we didn't. So now that</b> <b>we've gone through the quick summary of</b> <b>our device itself let's go ahead and</b> <b>let's create our first</b> <b>virtual machine. Now the eagle-eyed</b> <b>amongst you probably noticed up here</b> <b>quite handily we've got</b> <b>createvm and we've got createct create a</b> <b>container. We've also got some handy</b>
<b>buttons along the top</b> <b>for rebooting this host, shutting down,</b> <b>accessing the shell etc and</b> <b>also some bulk actions. Now</b> <b>you'll also when we create this virtual</b> <b>machine pay note to what</b> <b>you've actually got selected here</b> <b>if you have the node in this instance</b> <b>selected and you hit</b> <b>shutdown it will shut down the node</b> <b>and all the vms obviously if you want to</b> <b>shut down just the vm make</b> <b>sure you've got the vm selected</b> <b>and then click shut down. Now to create a</b> <b>vm you probably think</b> <b>you hit the createvm button</b> <b>well you do but first of all you need to</b> <b>download an iso file so just</b> <b>like we did for Proxmox itself</b> <b>let's go and pick an iso file let's</b> <b>download that let's get it</b> <b>running. So just say we've got</b>
<b>something to look at here i'm going to</b> <b>download Ubuntu desktop</b> <b>i'll download 2504 just in case</b> <b>we wanted to pass through our iGPU just</b> <b>because this comes with the</b> <b>latest kernel version that</b> <b>does support the iGPU. Most of you will</b> <b>probably be downloading</b> <b>the server version which will</b> <b>just be the command line interface and</b> <b>that's what i predominantly</b> <b>use in my home lab for all</b> <b>of my things like my docker server</b> <b>kubernetes etc. Now what you</b> <b>can do here is just click the</b> <b>download button itself that will</b> <b>obviously download the iso</b> <b>locally and then when you go</b> <b>over to your Proxmox host you can go to</b> <b>where it says local on the</b> <b>left this is local storage</b> <b>and then you can click iso images and</b> <b>then you'll be able to</b> <b>upload it or you might notice this</b> <b>download from url which will cut out one</b> <b>of those steps. So if we</b> <b>click this to start the</b> <b>download that should start if it doesn't</b> <b>we can actually just</b> <b>right click this copy the link</b> <b>address we can cancel the one we've got</b> <b>coming down head over into Proxmox</b> <b>download from the url</b> <b>paste it in hit query and then you can</b> <b>see here it's got that</b> <b>5.85 so if we hit download</b>
<b>that should now go away and begin that</b> <b>download process i'll see</b> <b>you once that's completed. So</b> <b>now that's completed we should be able to</b> <b>close this down and now we</b> <b>can see here that we've got</b> <b>this iso file available. So now we can</b> <b>click create a virtual</b> <b>machine and we're ready to start the</b> <b>wizard. I recommend you turn on the</b>
<b>advance just so you can see all of the</b> <b>options and you will</b> <b>need this available if you're going to be</b> <b>doing some additional things</b> <b>like adding through hardware</b> <b>etc. Now a good option that it opens up</b> <b>is obviously the startup</b> <b>boot so this means that</b> <b>if ever you reboot your Proxmox server</b> <b>this virtual machine</b> <b>will automatically restart.</b> <b>If you're using something like a firewall</b> <b>virtualized it's a really</b> <b>good idea to have that on</b> <b>otherwise your network's not going to</b> <b>come up automatically. So</b> <b>for this one i'm just going to</b> <b>call this one Ubuntu desktop and we're</b> <b>ready to move on to the next stage. So</b>
<b>for the OS i'm going</b> <b>to choose the one that we just downloaded</b> <b>that's that Ubuntu image</b> <b>there the storage is local</b> <b>later on you can choose different</b> <b>storages for what you want</b> <b>you can also use things like a</b> <b>network share for example and then we get</b> <b>on to the type of operating</b> <b>system it is. So obviously</b> <b>with Ubuntu being a Debian based system</b> <b>as well that's of type Linux and the</b> <b>kernel version is 6.x</b> <b>which it is. You can also choose on here</b> <b>different ones so Microsoft</b> <b>Windows and Solaris kernel.</b> <b>So if you are using something like</b> <b>Windows for example make sure you change</b> <b>the type of guest OS</b> <b>to Microsoft Windows and that'll give it</b> <b>better performance</b> <b>through better emulation.</b> <b>So if we click next we get on to some of</b> <b>the system settings. Now</b>
<b>this is where it can get</b> <b>a little bit tricky and i'll reference</b> <b>again my video for device pass through</b> <b>where i go into this</b> <b>in detail. Basically the default is going</b> <b>to work but the default is</b> <b>not going to give you the best</b> <b>experience especially when you're passing</b> <b>through hardware. In fact</b> <b>when you're passing through</b> <b>hardware you actually want to change this</b> <b>to a q35 device and you</b> <b>also want to change the bios</b> <b>over to a c bios. Now people will say and</b> <b>i've tested it myself</b> <b>things like the i440fx will still</b> <b>work for pass through but it is</b> <b>recommended per the documentation for</b> <b>q35. Because we're not going</b> <b>to be doing any pass through again check</b> <b>my video if you want to go</b> <b>and do that we're going to keep</b> <b>everything as default because i think</b> <b>this is the best way to get</b> <b>this up and running. Do note as</b> <b>well that if you go down the q35 route so</b> <b>things like windows 11 for</b> <b>example it will ask you to</b> <b>start adding tpms and enrolling keys and</b> <b>you probably want to go</b> <b>and read up on that. The best</b>
<b>thing to do really is to kind of add a</b> <b>tpm add some storage but</b> <b>don't auto enroll the key and</b> <b>that usually avoids most of the problems</b> <b>you're going to face. The</b> <b>virtio scuzzy single is going</b> <b>to be fine for this installation. Again</b> <b>if you're using a windows vm if you want</b> <b>to create that it'll</b> <b>often complain about the virtio drivers</b> <b>not being available so</b> <b>typically you're going to have to</b> <b>attach say a usb stick or something like</b> <b>that to your virtual</b> <b>machine when you go through that</b> <b>installation process and have the virtio</b> <b>drivers available. So we're</b> <b>going to click next and then</b> <b>it's going to ask us about the actual</b> <b>disk we want. So i'm going to leave this</b>
<b>as scuzzy in position</b> <b>zero i'm going to create the storage on</b> <b>local lvm which is this one</b> <b>over here. The disk size for</b> <b>this installation 32 gigs is going to be</b> <b>fine for this demonstration</b> <b>but obviously choose something</b> <b>that's going to work for you. You can</b> <b>also expand this later if you</b> <b>start to run out of space so</b> <b>don't worry about that. Now some</b> <b>important settings you want</b> <b>to be able to put on a discard</b> <b>but i believe discard only works when</b> <b>you've got ssd emulation on</b> <b>and what that basically means is</b> <b>it enables smart things like trim which</b> <b>allows it to basically claw</b> <b>back unused space from the</b> <b>virtual machine. So by default the</b> <b>virtual machine will try and claim all of</b> <b>that space but if it's</b> <b>not using it it can actually give it back</b> <b>to the hypervisor or back</b> <b>to another vm if that's also</b> <b>configured in this way. Everything else</b>
<b>we're going to leave as</b> <b>default and we're going to move on.</b> <b>Do note that there are bandwidth settings</b> <b>as well that you can specify for a</b> <b>virtual machine so if</b> <b>you've got say minimum levels of</b> <b>performance that you want for a virtual</b> <b>machine you could obviously</b> <b>go in there and tweak the bandwidth per</b> <b>device per vm. If we hit next</b> <b>we get onto the cpu. Now again</b> <b>there's a lot to take in here but let's</b> <b>try and keep it simple.</b>
<b>For a machine like mine and</b> <b>basically anything that is an enterprise</b> <b>your sockets are always</b> <b>likely to be one i.e you've</b> <b>got one socket on your machine and it has</b> <b>one cpu in it. On enterprise</b> <b>servers you can often get two</b> <b>three or four or even more these days on</b> <b>a motherboard and so as</b> <b>you scale that up you'll</b> <b>notice that you'll have more cores</b> <b>available. So i'm going to put this up to</b>
<b>two just to demonstrate</b> <b>a point. Here you can see that i've got</b> <b>one socket one core and one core</b> <b>available but if i actually</b> <b>put that up to two cores you can see that</b> <b>two cores are now</b> <b>available to that virtual machine.</b> <b>So what that means is it would take one</b> <b>core from each cpu but we know that we</b> <b>only have one cpu so</b> <b>make sure that you actually increase the</b> <b>cores and not the cpu. Now</b>
<b>you need to understand the</b> <b>notion of provisioning through a</b> <b>hypervisor. Now you know that we only</b> <b>have four cores on here</b> <b>so you might be surprised that i could</b> <b>actually set four cores for</b> <b>this virtual machine and you</b> <b>might think well how does the actual</b> <b>hypervisor still have any cores left?</b> <b>Well it's because it's</b> <b>a bit like a timeshare really it tries to</b> <b>allocate and reserve that much cpu or</b> <b>that much compute time</b> <b>and if it's available it will give it to</b> <b>it. It doesn't kind of</b> <b>hard carve that out and say</b> <b>only this virtual machine can use this</b> <b>core. You can actually pin</b>
<b>it and do things like that</b> <b>but by default it's not going to behave</b> <b>like that. One thing if you</b> <b>do have an enterprise server</b> <b>with multiple sockets and you're going to</b> <b>actually use cores from</b> <b>different sockets you probably want</b> <b>to make it numa aware and that's to do</b> <b>
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