Understanding ProxMox

Published on January 26, 2024 at 6:08 pm by LEW

Introduction

Proxmox kicked me in the rear, and I am not afraid to admit it. In fact Proxmox drove me back to Cockpit for awhile.

I understand how things work in a default Linux installation. And Cockpit was just a web GUI running over the top of that. And while I have and do run a few servers, my foray into virtual machines has been limited to Type 2 hypervisors like Virtual Box.

Needless to say, I was somewhat confused when I loaded up Proxmox, in that its interface and some of the principles behind it are, well lets just say a bit different.

Since I did want to learn Type 1 Hypervisors, I dropped back to using libvert with KVM and qemu from the command line, and later via Cockpit modules. Unfortunately to maintain the latest version of Cockpit, it pretty much requires running Fedora. Yes, I know it is available on other Distributions (and I used it on Debian), but keeping up with the latest resales is easier on Fedora Server (where it is installed by default).

Unfortunately, I am probably one of the few people who does not like or get along with Fedora. Frankly I find Fedora with Gnome rife with a “my way or the highway” sort of attitude (I consider them the up and coming Windows of Linux). Don’t get me wrong, Red Hat and Fedora have made considerable contributions to the Linux World. I, personally, just don’t like using the OS, which is a personal taste thing.

Now that I have rambled on long enough, I should get back to the point. To be fair to Porxmox I loaded it up on a server and forced myself to use it, reload it when I messed it up, and use it again. It took a bit of time, but I think I am finally getting a handle on using Proxmox. And I have to say it is running pretty good at the moment. I have virtualized a few of my servers, and they are running fine.

My issue with a lot of the information about Proxmox that is out there is focused on getting one up and running quickly, without to much effort put into explaining how Proxmox is setup and designed to work. And these are what always bubbles to the top of a search. This is unfortunate, as to really understand what you are doing requires understanding the way Proxmox does some things, which are frankly different from what most of us are used too.

So in this series of posts, I will not talk about a quick setup, but rather focus on some key principles I wish I would have understood going in.

Outline of Upcoming Posts

This is not meant to be a teaser, but rather an introduction. There is so much I want to discuss, that each subject or principle will literally need its own post (that is if I do not want to make one incredibly long post).

I want to introduce a little bit of organization up front. So I will list the subjects that I plan to cover in this series of posts. I will try to stick to the order of things I lay out here, and some posts are going to be pretty short. I will also link to some other sources that have helped me on my Porxmox journey.

However I am far from an expert on the subject. However I do know enough to be dangerous (did I mention I had to rebuild my original server several times).

The general outline I will be attempting to stick with is as follows;

Conclusion

I have listed the few topics I want to discuss. As I become more familiar with the product, expect the list to grow. I plan to come back to this post, and use it as an index as I progress. That means adding topics, and adding links to the posts on those topics.

This is a departure form my normal mode, which is to put all the links at the bottom of each post. But if there where a lot of related posts, that ended up taking as much time as writing a post. So I will be giving this a tryout.

As always, if you have thoughts, please post comments. I get few comments. Instead I tend to get a number of messages and emails through various platforms. Not really sure why this is instead of just adding a comment, but I appreciate getting those too.

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