Setting up Proxmox
This installs Proxmox itself, on its own machine, not inside anything else. The Home Assistant guide elsewhere in this Library is a concrete example of what to actually do with it afterward.
- 1
Download the installer and write it to a USB drive
The ISO from Proxmox's own site is written directly to a USB drive with a tool like Rufus (Windows) or balenaEtcher (macOS/Linux), then booted from on the target machine.
- 2
Run the graphical installer
It asks for the target disk, timezone, a root password, and the network settings for the management interface, a static IP is worth setting here rather than leaving it on DHCP, since that address is how the web UI gets reached afterward.
- 3
Reach the web UI
After the reboot, the dashboard is at the IP set during install, over HTTPS on port 8006.
- 4
Switch off the enterprise repository
By default, apt update fails because it points at a repository that needs a paid subscription. Switching Proxmox's package sources to the free no-subscription repository (covered in the docs below) is one of the first things almost every non-commercial install needs to do.
- 5
Create the first VM or LXC
From here it's a normal hypervisor: Create VM or Create CT from the top-right of the UI. The Home Assistant guide's Proxmox tab walks through exactly this for a real, useful example.
Further reading
- Proxmox VE documentation
Official installation and administration reference.
- Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts
Community one-line installers for dozens of self-hosted apps as VMs or LXCs, worth knowing about before building containers by hand.