Installing Proxmox on a Home Lab

Today I'll be installing Proxmax on these three servers. This will be a two-phase operation where I create the Proxmax cluster on the first server and then have the other two servers join the cluster. The reason I'm using Praxmax is to host virtual machines that I'll use for Kubernetes. My applications will then be installed on top of Kubernetes and Proxmax will give me a distributed storage layer called Seth. So what Praxmax gives me is flexibility and redundancy. If I lose a machine, my workloads can be shuffled around thanks to Kubernetes and Seph, which both sit on top of Proxmox. To get started, let's install Proxmox on the first server using a USB drive. First, you'll need to download a Proxmox ISO from their web page. Then, you'll need to flash the ISO onto a USB drive. I'll be using a program called Etcher to handle that. Once the drive is ready, plug it into your server and start it up. By the way, I'll have all the instructions for installing and expanding Proxmox on my GitHub page link in the description below. With the USB drive booted up, I'll select install Proxmaxve terminal UI. And I'll select the uh hard drive that it'll be installed on. This is going to be my default NVME drive. And then I'll click next. I'll put in my settings for my local information. I'll be going with US uh Detroit Michigan. And then I'll create a password. And it's really important that you enter an email address here. Finally, I'll set up the network configurations. For the management nick, I'll select my Ethernet interface. And for the host name, I'll use Proxmax01.heavy metalcloud.land. And for the other two servers, I'll be using praxmox02 and 03. Uh for the IP address, I'll go with 192.168.3.4 4 for the first server and the gateway will be the.1 address. The DNS will point to my OpenSense server which is 192.168.3.2. With all the settings in place, I'll click install and this will take a few minutes. Now that the initial setup is complete, I can hop on the web browser to finish things up. In my case, that URL will be 192.168.3.4 4 and using port 806. I'll log in using root and the password that I set up. This installation is for my home lab and won't be used for enterprise use. So, I'm going to disable all the subscription features. To do that, on the lefth hand menu, I'll go to data center and pract 01. Then from the main menu, I'll select updates repositories and then I'll click add. Select uh no subscription from the dropdown and then I'm going to disable any of the API repos with the word enterprise and then I'm going to click reload. Next I want to set up DNS and TLS. First I'll hop on my OpenSense server and then create an entry for DNS. I'll call the host PRMAX01 and the domain name will be heavy metalcloud.land LAN and the IP address will be 192.168.3.4 and then I'll click apply. With that in place, I'll hop back on the Proxmox management console to set up TLS. On the lefth hand side, make sure you have data center, then Proxmox01 selected. Then from the main menu, select system and certificates. Click the upload custom certificates button and then I'll locate my TLS certificate and click upload. So at this point the UI will reboot and this may take a few minutes. And now I should be able to access the management console using Proxmox01.heavy metalcloud.lan and using port 806. Now we want to define axmax cluster using our first server. A cluster allows us to group multiple physical servers together to act as one virtual environment. You start with one server and then join the other machines to the cluster. To create the cluster, make sure you selected data center on the lefth hand side. Then from the main menu, we'll select cluster. I'll click the create cluster button. And then I have to give it a name. I'm going to use Proxmax-cluster. For the network, I'll use my Ethernet IP address, which is 192.168.3.4. And then I'll click the create button. Now that the cluster is created, it's time to expand it. And we'll do that by inviting our other servers to join the cluster. To save some time, I've already installed Proxmox on the other two servers using my USB drive. To expand the cluster, I'll hop on the first server that created the Proxmax cluster. On the lefth hand side, I'll go to data center. Then on the main menu, I'll click cluster. Then I'm going to click the join information button. And now I want to click copy information. This is going to copy that big block of text. And we'll need this for the next step. Then I'll hop on my second Proxmax server that I want to add to the cluster. On the lefth hand side, I'll go to data center. Then on the main menu, I'll click cluster. In the information field, I'll paste that text from the last step. And you can see once I do that, the window is prepopulated with all our settings. The pure address will be the IP address of the Proxmox cluster. And this will be 192.168.3.4, which is the IP address of the first server. The password will just be the root password from the Proxmox cluster node. And for the fingerprint, you can leave that as default. For the cluster network, click the drop-own button and select the link address of the node that you want to join. In my case, that'll be 192.168.35. The per link address should already be populated with the cluster IP, which is 192.168.3.4. Now, let's click the join PRMAX cluster button, and this will take a few minutes. Okay, I've gone ahead and repeated those steps for the other Proxmox server. And now if I go back to the management console of the first server, you can see all three servers have joined the cluster. Okay, Proxmox is installed and all three machines have joined the cluster. In my next video, I'll install Seth to give us distributed storage in the cluster. Thanks for stopping by and I'll see you in the next video.

Learn how to set up a high-availability Proxmox cluster to host virtual machines and Kubernetes workloads! In this video, I'll walk through a two-phase operation: installing Proxmox on a primary server and then expanding the cluster to include two additional nodes for maximum redundancy and flexibility. 🔔 **Subscribe** for more hands‑on cloud tutorials! *To follow along, check out my GitHub page! All the commands and instructions from this video are in a README file:* *https://github.com/heavy-metal-cloud/youtube/tree/main/videos/build-your-own-cloud-series/09-proxmox-install* 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:04 - Proxmox OS Installation 00:02:11 - Post-Install: Accessing the Web UI 00:03:03 - DNS & TLS Certificate Setup 00:04:06 - Creating the Proxmox Cluster 00:04:54 - Adding Nodes: Expanding the Cluster Links referenced in this video: https://www.proxmox.com https://etcher.balena.io/ Amazon Affiliate Links - The Cloud Hardware: https://amzn.to/49GQo81 https://amzn.to/48c5nUT https://amzn.to/48bkX38 https://amzn.to/43Qeh9o https://amzn.to/43J6TfV https://amzn.to/4p7dsBx