Proxmox VE Server - Getting Started

What we will be doing

The purpose of this guide is to walk you through setting up a small homelab server using Proxmox Virtual Environment.

We will host a local DNS sinkhole, a reverse proxy with self-signed SSL certificates, a variety of containers, both Linux and Windows virtual machines, and we'll finish off with a virtual machine that has full graphics and USB controller passthrough.

This guide assumes you are familiar with Linux and that you're comfortable working in the command line. I won't be documenting every step and each button click, but rather focusing on the more interesting and challenging steps.

Why another guide?

There are many great guides out there, but there were three specific topics where I I still ended up scratching my head a bit. So I decided to share my notes and hopefully spare at least one person having to pull out all their hair.

Requirements

This guide assumes you have the following:

  • A PC to install a fresh copy of Proxmox on.
  • A second PC to access Proxmox's web UI.

Hardware Options

I'm a big fan of Ultra Small Form Factor PCs. If you're unfamiliar with them, Serve The Home has a great series of articles on them: Introducing Project TinyMiniMicro Home Lab Revolution - ServeTheHome.

You should be able to pick up an ex-business second-hand Dell Micro, HP Mini, Intel NUC, or Lenovo Tiny for about $100 with a socketed i5 CPU, 2x DDR4 SO-DIMM slots, and at least one NVMe slot. These units tend to pull around 10W of power at idle, using a 19V power brick similar to what laptops use.

Disclaimer

This guide is intended to be used for setting up a homelab for experimenting and development. It is not intended for use in production. Don't use it to store any sensitive or valuable information that you don't want to lose, and don't expose anything running on it to the internet. Your router and its firewall should already be doing a good enough job at this, but err on the side of caution.

More advanced guides and tutorials cover using a VPN so that you can securely access your homelab remotely. This guide won't be covering that.

External Links