Proxmox

Setting up the virtualization platform

I had been running a “server” on a laptop using Ubuntu since many years back. Over the years I had upgraded, reinstalled and changed it quite a lot and felt fairly comfortable plying around with Linux also without any GUI. In the past few months leading up to this build, I had also been looking into “virtualization” but primarily through Docker. I had also tried out Virtualbox on both Ubuntu and Windows. But when I started to read up a bit more about Hypervisors I quickly realized I really wanted to go all in and build what is commonly referred to as a “Type 1” or “bare metal” Hypervisor. There are a few options out there, with free versions of most of them, like VMware Esxi, Xen Server and Proxmox VE. The fact that the free version of Proxmox offers the same functionality as the paid version made my choice quite easy. I looked to have a decent community to find help from and the gui looked simple enough. 

The Proxmox GUI showing 10 VM's of which 5 are active.
Tweaking the BIOS for best performance for Proxmox

Downloading an ISO and using balena etcher to create a bootable USB was all it took to get going. Although the server runs “headless” i did start out connecting it to a screen, mouse and keyboard for the installation process. Specifically any changes in the BIOS obviously required a screen to be attached. There were quite a few changes I made, many of which I can’t remember any longer. One key item is of course to activate the CPU’s virtualization support. An area that did require a bit of extra effort was related to the PCI bus and being able to indivdually address e.g. each of the NIC’s on the Intel i350 card as well as the LSI disk controller. An important source when solving this problem was this link: https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Enable_Proxmox_PCIe_Passthrough

Once the Proxmox VE was up and running the next step was to prepare a bit for the VM’s. The most important part here was to prepare the HDD’s that I planned to use with TrueNAS which would be the very first VM to be installed.

To be honest, I can’t remember if I had to format all the disks in Proxmox first and then redo it in TrueNAS, which is using ZFS, and did it’s own formatting and “pooling” of the disks I ended up using. In the end 6 disks became one pool with 4 disks net storage and 2 for redundancy.