Proxmox System Requirements
Proxmox VE is light on hardware resources and can be installed on a wide range of hardware.
Minimum requirements
- A 64-bit Intel or AMD processor.
- Intel-VT and AMD-V instruction sets for hardware virtualization are supported by the CPU.
- 16 GB of disk space to install Proxmox. HDD or SSD with enough disk space to store VMs.
- 1 GB of RAM to install Proxmox and the additional amount of RAM to run VMs.
- At least one network card (network interface controller).
It is recommended that you use high-quality hardware to run Proxmox and VMs in production environments. Note that when using the ZFS file system (that supports thin provisioning for virtual disks) or Ceph, you need to provision at least an additional 8 GB for a start and increase this amount based on the installed amount of storage space.
Use multiple high-speed 1-Gbit (and faster) network interface controllers (NICs) for redundant network connections in case of a cluster setup.
Using the Proxmox ISO Installer
Using the ISO Proxmox installer written to a USB flash drive is the preferred method to install Proxmox as a complete solution in the appliance format on dedicated servers. Once you have prepared a bootable USB flash drive, as explained in the previous section, boot from this media to start the installation:
- Select the interface for the Proxmox installer and press Enter:
- Install Proxmox VE (Graphical) – using the graphical user interface
- Install Proxmox VE (Terminal UI) – using a DOS-like pseudo-graphical user interface
- Install Proxmox (Terminal UI, Serial Console) – using commands in the command line interface
We select the Terminal UI (option 2) for Proxmox installation because it has the highest compatibility for older hardware and for the newest hardware to avoid possible video driver issues.
- Read and accept the Proxmox VE end-user license agreement (EULA).
- Select a target disk and file system to install Proxmox VE. Select Advanced options for configuration. By default ext4 is selected as the filesystem, however there are some cases where ZFS is recommende like when we need to handle large amounts of data.
- Select regional settings, including the country, time zone, and keyboard layout. Hit Next at each step to continue.
- Enter the root password and confirm the root password. The Proxmox default username is root
in this case. There is no Proxmox default password – you must set a custom password at this step. You can enter the administrator’s email address for communication.
- Select a network interface, which will be the interface for Proxmox management via the network (ens33 in this case). Enter the network configuration. In this workflow, we use the following parameters:
- Hostname (FQDN): pve.localdomain
- IP address (CIDR) and netmask: 192.168.101.226/24
- Gateway address: 192.168.101.2
- DNS server address: 192.168.101.2
- Verify the configuration summary for Proxmox installation. Select Automatically reboot after successful installation. If everything is correct, hit Install.
- Wait until the full Proxmox VE solution is installed from a USB flash drive.
- Once Proxmox VE is installed and rebooted, you can see the login screen in the console and the https link to access the web interface in a web browser.
- Open the displayed address (for example, https://192.168.101.226:8006/) in a web browser. Ignore the certificate warning and connect anyway.
- Enter the Proxmox credentials specified during the Proxmox installation and click Login.
- Now, you see the web interface for Proxmox VE management. You can perform post-installation configuration and deploy virtual machines (VMs). See the post-installation configuration section below for information on how to do this.