Before I do anything on Proxmox, I do this first...

After setting up my Proxmox servers, there are a few things I do before I use them for their intended purpose. This ranges from updates, to storage, to networking and VLANS, to uploading ISOs, to clustering, to NIC teaming with LACP, and more. Join me as we pick up where the rest of the proxmox tutorials stop, and that's everything you need to do to make these production ready (and maybe a bonus item too)

(Affiliate links may be included in this description. I may receive a small commission at no cost to you.)

00:00 - Intro
00:23 - What are we going to talk about today?
00:52 - What problem are we trying to solve?
01:26 - Install the latest version of Proxmox
01:51 - How to update Proxmox without a subscription
03:10 - How to configure Proxmox storage (ZFS + RAID10)
05:32 - How to setup SMART monitoring with proxmox
06:18 - How to turn on PCI Passthrough with Proxmox (IOMMU)
07:57 - How to use VLANs with Proxmox and VLAN Aware
09:01 - How to set up a NFS share with Proxmox
09:54 - How to schedule backups with Proxmox
10:53 - How to back up a virtual machine on Proxmox (initial backup)
11:13 - How to upload the VirtIO ISO to Proxmox
11:45 - How to upload Windows / Ubuntu ISO to Proxmox
11:52 - How to create a NIC team (LACP, LAG) on Proxmox
13:51 - How to set up an aggregate (LACP, Team) on Unifi Switch Pro
15:10 - How to edit your NIC bond in Proxmox for NIC teaming
17:26 - How to create a virtual machine template on Proxmox
17:59 - How to clone a virtual machine in Proxmox
18:42 - How to fix Proxmox Linux clone NIC, machine ID, and ssh keys after cloning
19:46 - How to create a Proxmox Cluster
21:47 - Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments please!
22:26 - Stream Highlight - Our Discord Servers are awesome!

#Proxmox #Homelab #TechnoTim

"Vulnerability" is from Harris Heller's album SHINGU.

Thank you for watching!

[TechnoTim]

What's the first thing you do after installing Proxmox?

[owlmostdead]

Johnny Depp alternate version where he became a tech instead of an actor, good video.

[sking]

Love your videos Tim, the fact that you recently started creating videos and just like that we all depend on them is amazing, I love the way you explain things, the content of your videos and even your background, keep up the amazingly detailed work, the key for me is on the details that others ignore..!

[timesink]

This is such a tremendous video. I've been in IT for over 22 years now and had a Proxmox question today. Heading down the Google rabbit hole led me to this video, which not only answered my question, but taught me 15 other things. I love how the creator of the video is able to clearly explain in 30 seconds what other videos struggle to explain in 10 minutes, and this happens over and over. This 23 minute video contains more actionable information than any 23 *hours* of content I usually consume. I'm truly glad I found this channel today and I can't wait to see what else I'll learn from your channel.

[bneexotics]

Found this channel recently as I decided to setup a home server. In the space of a week I've gone from having zero idea of what to buy and how to set it up, to having a basic parts list and deep diving on Proxmox installations 😂 Can't thank you enough Tim 🙏 you keep making vids, I'll keep watching them mate 👍

[zepcom]

On the fdisk step to clear out disk partition information, you can avoid all the extra steps (p, d, etc for each partition) by just hitting g (write a gpt partition) followed by w (write to disk) ... saves lots of keystrokes when clearing out multiple drives.

[JoshBagwell]

In my quest for finding an OS to put on my soon-to-be-built server, I came across your Proxmox tutorials. Absolutely LOVE them.

[HenrikLarsson]

The best homelab content on YT atm. I appreciate that you learn as you go and are upfront with things that you might not fully understand 👍

[fawazharris]

Hi Tim, this is the first time that I fully understand how much work is put into making videos like this. Mate, absolutely Bloody Awesome

[AndreasLenze]

GREAT content, going down the Proxmox rabbit hole myself, self-taught. Good tips on cloning and clustering - cheers!

[nahchetay]

Great job Tim on your videos. Learned several things as I'm new to Proxmox itself. Did you ever get your answer on the LAG? miimon is basically when one of the links goes down how long does it take to switch the traffic to the other link(s), 1000 is 1 sec. The hash part you select L2+L3, it takes the src/dst mac and ip does an xor on the bits and modulo of port count to get a number from 0 to however many links in the lag. Uses that to determine the port link to transmit that specific mac/ip src/dst pair. As you can see it does not "load balance" between the links, you can still oversubscribe a link. In your freeway scenario think of a toll station before getting onto the freeway asking your destination and it then directs you to the lane to use. There are other options like TLB/ALB that can get closer to a load balancing aspect, that is a much deeper topic and also depends on your switch side what it supports as well and its balancing algorithm's. Anyways keep up the great work and have me as a subscriber.

[EmilioAyala]

As a Proxmox noob, this has been the most helpful starter vid I've come across. thank you so much for taking the time!

[tecratoshiba]

Thank you Sir! new to prox - have built labs for myself for 20 yrs. And having used VM's - I followed on to this - and hence I am here.. Cheers!

[GeoffSeeley]

@2:50 you should be using the command "pveupgrade" instead of "apt dist-upgrade". The former is a wrapper that calls the latter but it also will sync other things like EFI boot partitions, etc.

[AdmVrln]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for this video. I have to say that I really like your layout and how you explain what you do and the reason why. Many tutorials advise people how to, but don't ever touch on why.

Terrific stuff!

[ruprecht]

Just installed Proxmox for the first time, two hours ago, while watching your howto-video. Got my first ubuntu VM up easily.

I've got a home lab with three old HP DL380 G6/G7, currently running VM's with KVM on Ubuntu Server 18. Got it nicely scripted, via virsh, including cloning and creating custom netplan and hostname files. Never knew about that machine-id and DHCP issues, but I use static IP anyway, so it's never been a problem.

Just wanted to thank you for your channel. Really high on content!

[rxgamingofficial]

The best part was where you talked about the VLANs. I would love to see a shorter form video that has an easy to find name for people looking to do this specific thing. This is the best tutorial I was able to find. ❤❤

[PaulFulbright]

Not sure if someone pointed this out but the reason it gives you a range that has to be "near" physically is that each block of 4 ports is it's own little cluster. In an 8 port switch there are two boards with 4 ports each, those are then tied to the backplane, in a 16 port switch there are 4 boards with 4 ports each, etc. etc. It dawns on me now I have never tried to bond ports that weren't on the same switch group on the big boy switches we use at work but I wouldn't be entirely shocked if they had a similar restriction (though port groups larger than 4 definitely exist).

[mithubopensourcelab]

I take following care while installing Proxmox.

1. Boot Drives - 120 GB SSD X 2 - Select zfs - super useful if something breaks while updating it. Taking a boot drive snapshot using zfs command before updates. Plus you get added redudancy. No other spinning disks are added to Proxmox. Its not needed and compute power of Proxmox can be fully utilised if you have separate Storage Server. [ explained with following points ]

2. Keep NFS Server ready - I normally go with 5 spinning disks with on a separate host [ physical machine - with atleast 6 cores ] with again 2 120 GB SSD X 2 as boot drive [ in Raid 1 ] and 5 spinning disk with ZFS [ Choose RaidZ2 for RAID] . Create a dataset and export dataset as NFS. - I call this as Storage Server. Keeping separate storage server super useful. You will get full flexibility to do many things. With zfs you can set automatic snapshots with cron utility. I generally create dataset for each virtual machine. On a seperate NAS I export the ZFS snapshots. [ My snapshot policy is - 15 mins - hour life =4 snapshots, 1 hour - day life = 24 snapshots, 1 day - 1 week life = 7 snapshots, 1 month life - 4 months life = 4 snapshots ] So you will never have feel sorry, if god forbids, happens to your Proxmox Server, VM, Storage etc.

Only with seprate storage server you can have very smooth, fast live migration of VM's if you have a cluster. IO overhades are taken by Storage Server instead of Proxmox.


3. Create a sepearate and exclusive network between Proxmox and storage network without any gateway and connect the storage with seperate unmanaged and cheap giga switch.

4. Edit /etc/hosts file and add storage server ip and add storage host as storage.myoffice.local This facilitates me to change storage server IP at later course if required.

5. Install a few packages on Proxmox - zip, mlocate, net-tools, fail2ban, rkhunter, vim, git, ifupdown2

6. Install a proxy manager and expose Proxmox on port 80 instead of 8006 port. Also you can apply Let's encrypt certificate.

7. I choose install containers for Linux VM's [ They are super cool and bearly takes up ram ] and you can reset password, ip address from Proxmox ui itself.

8. For backups, I install a separate VM with Proxmox Backup Server - Integrate with Proxmox Host - get differential backups, which are very fast.

9. I generally disable the updates. I carry out update Proxmox once in a month after taking life snapshot of my boot drives.

10. I have tried CloudInit for Windows VM's- but not very successful.

11. Enable 2FA for admin UI [ With this you can expose Proxmox Server safely ]

12. I do not overprovision any of VM's [ In terms of cores and ram ] Use max 80 % of the host.

13. Install virtio drivers for every Linux and Windows VM's

14. Create seprate user for UI management. Never login with root.

15. Create separate datasets for ISO files, Backups. All VM's conf files are backed up [ very small - generally 1 kb ] and kept on gdrive.


With this Proxmox is super stable [ never failed ] and delivers me Production class - enterprise solution.

If you like these tips, you can add up on you git - with due credit.

[johnhawkins]

Thanks so much Tim! This is just great. I'm level 0 at this stuff but i followed this setup and after a hd failure, as soon as the server connected to the NFS share there were the backups.