Installing Proxmox VE 7.4

In this article, we will see the installation process of a Proxmox VE virtualization server in version 7.4

If you still don’t know what Proxmox VE is or what function or features it has, you can click on the following link Introduction to Proxmox VE

Actions and requirements necessary before installing Proxmox VE

• Have a server to install Proxmox VE that has at least 1 64-bit microprocessor with 4 cores or more, at least 2 GB of RAM and a network card.
• Prepare an installation media, DVD or USB Flash Drive prepared. In case of using the variant of preparing a USB stick with the Proxmox VE ISO image file, we recommend using the Balena Etcher software
• Verify and Enable the CPU virtualization functions in the Server Setup to use to virtualize with Proxmox VE (Intel VT, VM), they are normally found in CPU options.
• Disable C states or power saving states of the processor to achieve higher performance.
• Verify that all processors are active, Hyper Theading enabled if available.
• If possible, start the computer in UEFI mode if available.

To begin, you must connect the installation media to the server where it is going to be installed, power on and boot (boot) using the aforementioned installation media.

Once the computer starts using the installation media, you should see the following screen

Next, we will choose the first option and press enter. We hope that it loads the installation process and displays the following screen showing the software license agreement.

To continue, we click on the “I agree” button, which indicates that we accept the terms and conditions. We wait for the screen shown below to appear.

On this screen, we will select the disk where the Proxmox VE server operating system will be installed. This disk will be completely formatted. It is possible to change some additional options available by clicking on the “Options” button,

You can leave it with the default values ​​and click “OK” and then the “Next” button. We wait for the following screen to be displayed in which we will select the country, time zone and keyboard layout that we will use on the server we are installing.

Once the data is completed, we click on the “Next” button again to continue to the next screen. Here we will establish the password to access the server and the administrator email.

Please note that the password must be at least 8 characters and use letters, numbers and symbols, and the email to be used must be in a valid format. Once the data is completed, we click on the “Next” button to continue. We wait for the following screen to be shown, in which we will specify the connectivity data that our server will use.

After specifying which network card we will use to access the server, the host name it will use, the IP address and network mask in CIDR format, the gateway and the DNS server it will use to make the queries; then we can click “Next”. We will wait for the next screen, which will be a summary of all the options we have specified, as shown in the following example image.

At this step, we will check that all the information is correct and click on the “Install” button. Otherwise, if there is any incorrect data we can return using the “Previous” button and return to the screen where the incorrect data was entered. We correct the error and return to this step. Once the installation starts, all that remains is to wait a few minutes for it to complete and while we can see the screens with information that is displayed.

Once the installation is complete, the following screen will be displayed.

Next, the server will reboot, it will display the Grub as shown in the following screen. After a few seconds the operating system loading process will begin.

Once the operating system has loaded, the screen should look like the following image. It will inform us which URL we should use to access the server over the network using a web browser.

The default access URL to a Proxmox VE server is https://server_ip:8006. Once we have reached this point we can access this server from another PC that is on the network with the newly installed server. On this other computer we must have a web browser installed (Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, etc.) in which we will enter the URL that the server that we have installed previously showed us in the address bar.

Once the URL is entered in the browser, an error like the one shown below should appear. In this case we are using Mozilla Firefox. If we use another browser, the error will be displayed differently. In any case, the error is that our server is using self-signed certificates for the “https” connection, so we will proceed to ignore the warning and click on advanced, and then accept the risk and continue.

If everything has gone well we should now be able to see the administration web page of our Proxmox VE server as shown below. On this page we see the login form to be able to authenticate and access the server. To authenticate we will use the root user and the password that we specified during the server installation. We can also specify the language we want for our server’s administration interface.

After authenticating correctly, we should receive a warning like the one shown in the following image that tells us that we do not have a valid subscription for this server. We click on the “OK” button.

The use of Proxmox VE is allowed even if we do not have a paid subscription. Having one offers us the advantage of having access to technical support from the developer team. Additionally, have access to the stable and recommended repository for use in enterprise environments on production servers.

At this point we have already installed our Proxmox VE server and we can begin to take advantage of virtualization at the server level using Proxmox VE. Other topics related to Proxmox VE will be addressed in subsequent articles.

To learn more about Proxmox VE you can review the following articles:

Create a virtual machine in Proxmox VE Step by Step

Create an LxC container in Proxmox VE Step by Step