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Installing Proxmox VE

· 3 min read · 565 words
proxmox virtualisation homelab linux
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Contents

What is Proxmox VE?

Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) is a free, open-source hypervisor built on Debian. It supports both KVM-based virtual machines and LXC containers, and comes with a decent web UI out of the box — no need to pay for a VMware licence.

Hardware

For this build I’m running Proxmox on two nodes:

NodeCPURAMStorage
pve-01Intel Core i5-1240032 GB DDR4500 GB NVMe (OS) + 2 TB SSD (VMs)
pve-02Intel Core i5-1040016 GB DDR4256 GB NVMe (OS) + 1 TB SSD (VMs)

Downloading the ISO

Head to the Proxmox downloads page and grab the latest Proxmox VE ISO Installer. At the time of writing that was 8.x.

Flash it to a USB drive with something like Balena Etcher or dd:

dd if=proxmox-ve_*.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=1M status=progress

Replace /dev/sdX with your actual USB device — double-check with lsblk before running this.

Installation

  1. Boot from the USB. You may need to enter the BIOS (Del / F2 / F12 depending on your board) and either change the boot order or use the one-time boot menu.

  2. Select Install Proxmox VE (Graphical).

  3. Accept the EULA.

  4. Target disk — select your intended OS drive. I used the NVMe. Leave the filesystem as ext4 unless you have a reason to use ZFS (ZFS is great but needs RAM).

  5. Location and timezone — set your country and timezone.

  6. Password and email — set a strong root password. The email is used for system notifications.

  7. Network configuration — this is important:

    • Set a static IP for the management interface (e.g. 192.168.1.10/24)
    • Set the gateway to your router’s IP
    • Set a DNS server (I use my Pi-hole IP, falling back to 1.1.1.1)
    • Give the node a hostname like pve-01.local

  8. Review the summary and click Install. The process takes a few minutes.

  9. Remove the USB when prompted and let the node reboot.

First Login

Once it’s back up, open a browser and navigate to:

https://192.168.1.10:8006

You’ll get a certificate warning — that’s expected for a self-signed cert. Accept it and log in with root and the password you set during install.

Post-Install Steps

Disable the Enterprise Repo (no subscription)

By default Proxmox points at the enterprise apt repository, which requires a paid subscription. If you don’t have one, switch to the no-subscription repo to get updates.

In the web UI: Node > Shell, then:

# Disable enterprise repo
echo "# disabled" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.list

# Add no-subscription repo
echo "deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve bookworm pve-no-subscription" \
  > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-no-subscription.list

apt update && apt dist-upgrade -y

Remove the Subscription Nag

The web UI shows a “No valid subscription” popup on every login. You can patch it out:

sed -i.bak "s/data.status !== 'Active'/false/g" \
  /usr/share/javascript/proxmox-widget-toolkit/proxmoxlib.js

systemctl restart pveproxy

Enable IOMMU (for PCIe Passthrough)

If you plan to pass through a GPU or other PCIe device, enable IOMMU in the bootloader config.

For systems using GRUB:

# /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet intel_iommu=on iommu=pt"

update-grub
reboot

For AMD CPUs replace intel_iommu=on with amd_iommu=on.

Verify after reboot:

dmesg | grep -e DMAR -e IOMMU

Set Up Storage

In the web UI, go to Datacenter > Storage to add your VM storage disk. I added the 2 TB SSD as a Directory type datastore, pointed at a partition mounted at /mnt/data.

What’s Next

With both nodes up, the next step is connecting them into a cluster and setting up Proxmox Backup Server on dedicated hardware for automated VM backups.