Background
Since my VMware experience has ended, and I do want to get more experience with other tools, I’ve copied my important files off of the VMware servers to my KVM host (the R710). Once I verified I had everything, I’ve installed Proxmox on the three R720XDs.
I’ve done this in the past on my KVM system and couldn’t easily figure out how to get things set up. A couple of jobs back, I was finally able to do some automation and converted the system to KVM only (libvirt and qemu) and used the terraform provider for libvirt to actually build systems. Worked just peachy.
But I have access to a set up environment now at work so I have some data I can lean on. It works there. I can and have created VMs. So I can lean into it a little, do some searching, and come up with the proper way to set it up. As it’s a Home Lab, I can make mistakes. I do want to see if I can use terraform with Proxmox. I saw a couple of notes saying it wasn’t a great provider so we’ll see.
Proxmox Setup
I downloaded proxmox-ve_9.0-1.iso, used Rufus to format one of the 16G mini thumb drives, and booted each of the three servers to the drive (select F11 to go into the Boot Menu, then select the Cruzer USB drive).
The process was pretty simple. Select country and timezone, set up root’s password and email, then configure the hostname, ip, and gateway. It installs a configured Debian 13 (trixie) system. I will note that at the start, sudo isn’t installed. Not sure what else is missing 🙂
The two things I need to better understand with Proxmox is networking and storage.