Simple install for Proxmox on Debian 12

  • May 22, 2024
  • June 18, 2024
  • del

I have been experimenting with Proxmox at home and while I have tried the ISO installer that is available, I didn’t like the fact of not being able to set up the drives the way I wanted to. I didn’t, for example, want the Proxmox installer to decide for me that I should have an LVM for virtual machine data on the same drives as the root/OS. I was planning on setting up Ceph with different drives for that. So, I just installed Debian 12 directly to give me control over the layout.

The node machines I am using are:

  • SuperMicro SYS-1027GR
  • 2 x Xeon E5-2680v2 (2.8Ghz 10-core)
  • 128GB RAM
  • 200GB SSD (2 drives in RAID 1) OS
  • 1 x 3.2TB Intel P4610 NVMe U.2 drive for Ceph OSD
  • 10Gbit fiber networking (Intel X520)

I have them connected via a Ubiquiti 10Gbit fiber switch (USW-Aggregation) along with the other servers.

Doing the Debian 12 install is quite simple but it is worth mentioning that I *did* have issues with Proxmox if I installed via DHCP. You will want to make sure to ‘go back’ when the network is installed and set a static IP address for the node. Otherwise I had issues with getting the Proxmox GUI to run.

With the base install done and booted in to Debian 12, you will want to run this:

echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve bookworm pve-no-subscription" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-install-repo.list

wget https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/proxmox-release-bookworm.gpg -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/proxmox-release-bookworm.gpg

apt update && apt -y full-upgrade

apt -y install proxmox-default-kernel

Then reboot.

Once the system is up once more, log in as root and do the following:

apt -y install proxmox-ve postfix open-iscsi chrony

apt -y remove linux-image-amd64 'linux-image-6.1*'

update-grub

apt -y remove os-prober

Then you will need to reboot again.

I put the above in to a scripts called ‘proxmoxinstall_part1‘ and ‘proxmoxinstall_part2‘ (add #!/bin/bash at the start of it). I used that to make the install simpler for me by just copying in the scripts and running them. This helped me get all nodes up and running simply and consistently.

You may also want to install and run the script from here: https://github.com/foundObjects/pve-nag-buster/ if you are tired of being told you don’t have a subscription.

Once all nodes are up and running, choose one to be your ‘home/main’ node and start making a cluster.

del