Proxmox installation guide

Downloading the image

The first step for setting up your proxmox server environment is to download the installation media from https://www.proxmox.com/en/downloads/proxmox-virtual-environment/iso. Depending on your needs you can choose an older version, however I would always choose the latest stable release.

Preparing boot disk

Now that the installation media is ready, we need to prepare a boot disk, which can be used in your server computer on an USB-port. My recommended approach is to look for a USB stick that you have lying around somewhere, and installing Ventoy on this USB. Ventoy can be found at https://sourceforge.net/projects/ventoy/files/latest/download. After choosing the correct file for your environment, you can extract the archive and start ”Ventoy2Disk”. After this you can choose your USB-stick in the dropdown menu. There are various options available in Ventoy, for which some may not work for your environment. In the ”option” bar, choose carefully the correct settings, such as ”secure boot”, ”mbr/gpt” and ”partition configuration: file system”. If your environment is Windows, you may want to change the file system to FAT32, since it can only boot from this file system. If you are content with the settings, click on install.

The only thing left to do is to put the proxmox image on your USB-stick, which is probably called “VENTOY”. Copy the ”.iso” file.

Installation on computer

Now that the USB-disk is ready, we can insert the USB into the computer and boot the computer. It is recommended to have a keyboard en monitor for this computer. During the booting you need to go to the boot menu, by pressing Esc, or F10-12, depending on your environment. Now choose in the BIOS to boot from an USB first, by changing the boot order. Walk through all steps and configure a password and network. If everything is configured correctly it should restart, otherwise do this yourself. After the restart you should see a message containing the URL of your proxmox installation.

Opening proxmox on other device

Now that proxmox is installed, you can go to another device in your network of preference and open a web-browser. Now go to the URL which was shown in the previous step. You should be welcomed with a login screen, after accepting the ssl-warning.

GPU passthrough

If you ever want to use a GPU in your machine, you should blacklist the drivers in order to utilize them. This can be done, as per the documentation on https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/PCI_Passthrough, using:

For AMD:

echo "blacklist amdgpu" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
echo "blacklist radeon" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

For Nvidia:

echo "blacklist nouveau" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf 
echo "blacklist nvidia*" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf 

For Intel GPUs (iGPU)

echo "blacklist i915" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Starting your journey

Now that Proxmox is installed, you can begin to install VMs and LXCs. My recommended resources for this is Proxmox Helper Scripts. If you have surveilance cameras and are interested in object detection, you can take a look at my frigate tutorial.