Introduction

Building a consistent base Virtual Machines (VM) is one part of my Proxmox mini PC refurbishment project. In this video I’m creating a reusable base Debian server, so every VM starts from the same stable foundation.

I use Debian for most servers because stability matters more than bleeding edge software. One of the few exception is my gaming server, which runs Arch for newer libraries.

This article walks through my base Debian build in detail. And yes, I’ve done this before. But most of the servers I’m building in this project rely on this template, so I’m refreshing it here.

Since some of these servers will require storage expansion later, I will call out the specific decisions I made to account for this in the build. You should watch all the way through, because I’ll point out the key decision points to be aware of before you start your own build.