Install Proxmox remote without KVM

Proxmox VE is a Type 1 Hypervisor and it uses KVM for VMs and LXC for containers. It is fully open source, but it requires a license to access the enterprise repositories. For this tutorial we will enable non-subscription repositories for use without a license. Downside of this is that package updates are slower to arrive to this repository.

Prerequisites:

• Ideally a server with two or more similar drives to configure ZFS or other raid systems
• For VMs is also recommended to have their own external IP addresses
• A server with a CPU that allows virtualization

1 Initial Setup

To start the installation we will need to boot from a bootable disk or iso which already have installed qemu-system-x86_64.

1.1 Setting up the pseudo VM

Now we need to set up the VM that we use as a pseudo-server to install Proxmox onto. First we need to open an SSH connection to the server.

ssh root@<SERVER_IP>

Now we need to get a installation ISO. You can use the wget to download this ISO. Please visit downloads page from here and copy link address of the latest download iso.

wget http://download.proxmox.com/iso/proxmox-ve_6.2-1.iso

Command used to run the VM will be different for every server but it is mostly dependent on the amount of drives you have. To list all your drives run the lsblk command.

An example of the completed command is:

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -smp 4 -m 4096 -boot once=d -cdrom ./proxmox-ve_6.2-1.iso -drive file=/dev/sda,format=raw,media=disk -drive file=/dev/sdb,format=raw,media=disk -vnc 127.0.0.1:1

Now while VM is running you need to access it. For security reasone VNC access port is bound locally so you will need to use an SSH tunnel to access it. You can open one by running command in your local terminal:

ssh -L 8888:127.0.0.1:5901 root@<SERVER_IP>

2. Install Proxmox

After you are connected to the VNC you will be able to see your VM like the following one.

First you will want to do is to configure the storage. If you have more than 2 drives select at least RAIDZ-1 but if you have only 2 drives select RAID0.

For network configuration your server should automatically get the correct information using DHCP or otherwise you need to configure a static IP.

Once Proxmox is installed just press reboot and let it boot into Proxmox then we need to configure the network for Proxmox.

The following config can be used as a guide for you network configuration:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

#auto enp2s0
iface enp2s0 inet manual

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
	address SERVER_IP
	netmask SERVER_NETMASK
	gateway SERVER_GATEWAY
	bridge_ports enp2s0
	bridge_stp off
	bridge_fd 0