Proxmox Virtual Environment Guide 🖥️🚀

By Aaron Colin. March 13, 2025.

What is Proxmox?

Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) is a powerful, open-source virtualization platform that combines KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) for full virtualization and LXC (Linux Containers) for lightweight containerization. It’s designed for both home-lab enthusiasts and enterprise environments, providing a feature-rich web interface to manage VMs, containers, storage, and networking.

Why Use Proxmox?

🔹 Free & Open-Source – No vendor lock-in, full transparency, and a strong community.
🔹 Powerful Virtualization – Run multiple operating systems using KVM-based virtual machines.
🔹 Efficient Containerization – Deploy lightweight LXC containers for services and applications.
🔹 Centralized Web UI – Manage everything with an intuitive browser-based interface.
🔹 Advanced Storage Management – Supports ZFS, LVM, Ceph, NFS, and more.
🔹 High Availability & Clustering – Scale your infrastructure with built-in failover and clustering support.
🔹 Backup & Restore – Integrated backup tools to protect your VMs and containers.

What You’ll Learn in This Guide

This guide will walk you through everything you need to know to get started with Proxmox:

🔧 1. Installation on Bare Metal

  • Choosing the right hardware for Proxmox VE.
  • Downloading and preparing the Proxmox installation media.
  • Step-by-step installation and initial setup.

⚙️ 2. Initial Configuration & Web Interface

  • Setting up networking for access and remote management.
  • Configuring Proxmox repositories and system updates.
  • Enabling SSH access for advanced management.

📂 3. Storage Setup & Management

  • Understanding storage types in Proxmox (local, NFS, ZFS, etc.).
  • Setting up and managing storage pools.
  • Best practices for optimizing storage performance.

🖥️ 4. Creating and Managing Virtual Machines (VMs)

  • Setting up a new VM with different OS images.
  • Understanding CPU, RAM, and disk allocation.
  • Snapshots, backups, and cloning for VMs.

📦 5. Deploying LXC Containers

  • What are LXC containers, and why use them?
  • Creating and configuring lightweight Linux containers.
  • Managing resources and permissions.

🛠 6. Advanced Features & Best Practices

  • Using Proxmox Backup Server for efficient backups.
  • Setting up clustering and high availability.
  • Optimizing performance and security best practices.

Who is This Guide For?

🔹 Beginners looking to get started with virtualization.
🔹 Homelab enthusiasts wanting to build a powerful, self-hosted infrastructure.
🔹 Developers & Sysadmins needing an efficient environment for testing and production workloads.
🔹 Anyone interested in learning Proxmox and self-hosting!

Let’s Get Started! 🚀

Ready to build your own virtualized environment? Follow along, and let’s dive into Proxmox VE!

🔗 Next: Installing Proxmox on Bare Metal