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.
Storage
Well, in this case I have three systems with 32 Terabytes of spinning disk in each so 96 total Terrabytes of storage. This is instead of a central drive array. Eventually when I need to upgrade the hardware, I may search for more power thin servers and a separate large storage array. Future plans.
Networking
This was the more interesting part. My configuration is an incoming connection from Netlight, city fiber, which goes to this cluster. There’s an outbound connection to the house WiFi router.
On the three servers is a pfSense server VM. This is the middle part of this network path. It’s connected to one of the network ports on each of the R720XD servers. The Proxmox servers use the pfSense network as the route back out to the internet. And pfSense has one of the ad blocker tools installed. See the pfSense blog post for details on the configuration.
When creating VMs, they will be on one of several internal networks. I have these created to emulate a Development to Production corporate configuration. In addition, a 5th network are my personal servers. Corporate lets me practice automation, kubernetes, and other CI/CD type DevOps tasks. Personal has my pictures and other media.
Virtual Machines
Initially you have to upload the ISOs for the different installations to the Proxmox server where you’ll be creating VMs. In my case, with 150 or so VMs, I have the same ISOs on each Proxmox server.
Next up is I create Templates from the ISOs. Basically 2 gigs of RAM, 50 gigs of Storage, and 2 CPUs. They can be adjusted as required but most systems can operate without issue at this level.
The following VLANs are used for each of the environments.
- VLAN101 – Development
- VLAN102 – QA
- VLAN103 – Staging
- VLAN104 – Production
- VLAN105 – Personal
When creating the VM, there are two networking configuration options that must be set. For the network interface, uncheck the Firewall option. These are internal systems, pfSense manages firewalls, and third, each system has a firewall configured.
Second, add the appropriate VLAN tag for the interface.