Proxmox Installation

Assumptions:

• Your hardware setup is complete and ready to go
• You already have a Debian 11 system installed and ready on your host machine (we'll call this host machine as the HomeLab from here on out). If not, read this.
• You have debian connected to the internet

Installing Proxmox

Note: This documentation is a mirror of this official Proxmox wiki.

1. Set up your /etc/hosts file

     127.0.0.1      localhost
     192.168.1.17   homelab homelab.home pveproxy
   
     # The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
     ::1     localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
     ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
     ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
   

2. Test your /etc/hosts file

   hostname --ip-address
   192.168.1.17 # Should return the IP address assigned to the node.
   

3. Add the Proxmox repository into apt

   echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve bullseye pve-no-subscription" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-install-repo.list
   

4. Add the GPG keys and verify

   wget https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/proxmox-release-bullseye.gpg -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/proxmox-release-bullseye.gpg
   # verify
   sha512sum /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/proxmox-release-bullseye.gpg
   7fb03ec8a1675723d2853b84aa4fdb49a46a3bb72b9951361488bfd19b29aab0a789a4f8c7406e71a69aabbc727c936d3549731c4659ffa1a08f44db8fdcebfa  /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/proxmox-release-bullseye.gpg
   

5. Install Proxmox VE

   apt install proxmox-ve postfix open-iscsi
   

   Note: If you have a mail server in your network, you should configure postfix as a satellite system. Your existing mail server will then be the relay host which will route the emails sent by Proxmox VE to their final recipient. If you don't know what to enter here, choose local only and leave the system name as is.

6. Reboot your System into Proxmox

   systemctl reboot
   

7. Remove the Debian Kernel

   Proxmox VE ships its own kernel and keeping the Debian default kernel can lead to trouble on upgrades, for example, with Debian point releases. Therefore, you must remove the default Debian kernel, and then update grub bootloader:

   apt remove linux-image-amd64 'linux-image-5.10\*'
   update-grub
   

8. Removing the OS-Prober Package [OPTIONAL] In my homelab setup, I have setup a dual-boot system with Windows 11 and Debian/Proxmox. If you have no such dual-boot config on your homelab setup, feel free to remove the os-prober package. Removing this package will avoid unexpected (VM) images from being scanned and added as boot entries into your grub loader:

   apt remove os-prober
   

9. Log-on to Proxmox Web Interface as root Proxmox enables a web interface on port 8006 on the homelab's assigned IP: https://192.168.1.17:8006. You can login to the proxmox system using root (PAM authentication)

10. Create an Admin group and a user account Create an Admin group using the "Group" section and name it "Admin". Next, create a user account. The user account must already exist on the system (you may already have created this user account during Debian 11 installation). This can be done using the Users section of the Datacenter tab: Add the new user to the "Admin" group.

11. Add Administrator permissions to the Admin group Click on "Permissions" tab and add a new group permission for path "/". Add the Admin group and the "administrator" role:

12. Logout and login as the non-root user. We are now ready to start using Proxmox.