build a home lab server with proxmox

What is a home lab server ? Does it really need  to be a big, loud 19 inch rack beast that eats  electricity for breakfast? I don’t think so. I  recently bought this little PC here second hand  on e-Bay for roughly 200 bucks. It’s got an Intel  i5 processor with 4 cores, it’s small and silent.   I upgraded the RAM to 16 Gbytes and I added a  Terabyte SSD drive. Now let’s install a software   called Proxmox on it that provides virtualization  in Vms (so virtual machines) or Linux containers   as well as many other Enterprise scale  features such as software defined storage,   replication, backup, thin storage provisioning  as well as high availability. Stay tuned.

Please use the chapter markers and the  time line if you want to skip parts of  the videos. You can see the sections here  on the timeline ? Those are the chapters.  I have also put them into the description. In the last video we built a little home lab  server on Ubuntu Server 20 that runs Virtualbox,  Docker, Webmin and Portainer. That works perfect  if you want to have an always on device where  you run for example your home automation software  and a file server on it. Today we are going  to take this to the next level. What do I mean  by that? Enterprises or large corporations have  started to virtualize their environments a couple  of years ago. What that means is that rather  than buying hundreds of servers on metal or  “tin” like it’s called in IT, for each service,  they buy that one or two big fat servers  and run many servers as virtual machines on  those. 

They use technologies like KVM or QEMU,  very often on VMware ESX Servers. These solutions  are enterprise scale and so is their price tag.  In one of the last sessions with you guys on  my discord server someone pointed out that  he is using a software called ProxMox to run his  machines on. Following up on this I had a look at  it and I must say that I am amazed. Their busines  model is such that the software is free but if you  want support and maintenance like you need it  in the enterprise then you just pay for that.  I like that business model because it  gives us hobbyists the possibility to  use enterprise scale solutions and at the  same time provides revenue for the company  and ultimately for the developers. Enough  talking, let’s get this installed. Now let’s go.

As usual when I set up a new machine, I use  ventoy in order to boot from a USB stick.  I have downloaded the Proxmox ISO from their  website and boot from it. The Proxmox installation  is wizard-driven, so the installer asks me  for the most important technical details such  as my new user account, the network parameters  etc. Once I have answered all those questions,  the installer starts coping files and installs  ProxMox on the server. That does take a couple  of minutes. You can see at the bottom that it  installs .deb packages. Proxmox is in fact Debian  Linux with additional tools and its own Kernel  distribution. At the end of the installation,  the installer tells me that I can now browse to  port 8006 on my server once I have rebooted it.

 

Awesome, we have successfully installed Proxmox  on that little PC. We can now remove the screen  and keyboard and move the PC to our network  rack. From now on we will run it “headless”,  that means access it over the network.

If you want to run virtual machines then what you  want is as many CPU cores as possible. This PC has  4 cores. If you want more then you can either  use a PC with an Intel i7 processor which would  provide 8 cores or – if you want to play serious  – use a server scale processor like the AMD Epyc.  There are also low power versions  of that such as the Epyc 3251  which runs at roughly 50 Watts  – here is a quick comparison: We need to be careful here because to some  extend this is comparing apples to pears.  

The AMD Epyc is a server scale processor while  the i5 is made for desktops. The Epyc focuses  on cores and hyper threading while the i5 has  integrated graphics etc. Also, the i5 is much  older. From a benchmark perspective the Epyc is  2 to 3 times more powerful but this is mainly  because of the multiple cores. If we compare  one single thread they are roughly even. Where  things become interesting is the CPU Mark per  Dollar. And here the i5 actually beats the Epyc.  

But this is no surprise as older CPUs generally  have better values here than newer ones.  I am particularly interested in the  cost of running it over the year  as the device will be always on and this is  where the i5 is roughly 30% lower than the Epyc.

So as you can see the Epyc is definitely  much more powerful – but so is the price tag.  For me, the little i5 will do. I am  not planning to mine crypto currency  or anything like that ;-) - Cool, let’s  have a look at the proxmox interface. The Proxmox user interface is an https frontend,  that means that you don’t need any type of client  other than a web browser. From this interface you  can do all administrative tasks on your Proxmox  server because there is also an integrated shell.  So if ever the GUI does not provide what you need  then you can most certainly do it from the shell.  Proxmox by design is enterprise scale, hence you  could add multiple nodes and do high availability  between the nodes and also run backups or  replication between them. I only have one node  here. If you want to provide Exabyte’s of storage  then you can also install ceph which can provide  Object, Block and File storage on a large scale.  

After the installation Proxmox defines  two default Logical Volumes with LVM,  one for the root drive and one as a local  storage for images of containers and Vms.  Another nice thing is the deep integration  with ZFS which is a DE duplicating file system,  that means a ZFS Volume can store  more data than the actual volume size  because it would only store redundant blocks of  data once. A lot of stuff in here. Of course the  usual admin things such as logs, DNS, network  etc. Are here as well. A real one stop shop. So as you can see there are a lot of  options and possibilities here. I will  only use a fraction of those. First  let me set up my network and storage. Two things need a bit of tweaking in my personal  environment. The first one is the fact that I  have multiple VLANs, one for my LAN, one  for the guests and one for my IOT devices.  

I am running shinobi as a cctv software in order  to record footage from my surveillance cameras.  And those cameras are in a segregated IOT network  because I do not want them to phone home to their  vendor. Also I do not want the traffic from  shinobi to the webcams to go over the VLAN  because that would put load on my router  and make the available bandwidth for other  things lower in my network. Therefore I added  a USB Ethernet card and connected it directly  to the IOT network where my cameras are. The  only thing that did not work well with the GUI  was actually to configure the network adapters for  DHCP. That needed to be done in the config files.  Configuring the storage to me means that I just  added a 5 TB USB Disk where I store all my files.  

Adding storage to Proxmox can be done on the  datacenter level – which is logical because it  might be replicated over multiple nodes. In my  case I have just added a directory on the disk  which can store all types of information  such as disk images, ISO files, containers  or templates and backups. My plan is to use  the fast internal SSD for the disk images  and use the slower external spinning  hard drive for file data such as music,  videos, fotos and documents and provide mount  points on that disk to the containers as needed. Great, so now the system has one leg in each  of my networks, one in IOT and one in the  LAN I can therefore access my video cameras  in the IOT network directly over the switch  without having to go over the router. The big  disk that I added over the USB port can be used  for storing files and the internal SSD can be  used to store Virtual Machines and containers.  

Actually, let me create my first virtual machine.  I want to quickly import an OpenWrt router which  we have created in the first virtual box episode  and set the networks accordingly. Let’s  migrate that machine from Virtualbox to Proxmox.

In Virtualbox I click on file, then Export  Appliance and then I pick the machine to export.  The open standard to migrate virtual machines from  one platform to the other is called Open Virtual  Appliance OVA or Open Virtualization Format OVF.  Just need to include a so called manifest file  that contains the actual description of the VM.  Once I click on export then virtual box creates  the OVA file for me. Next I need to transfer it  to the proxmox server – in order to do this I use  FileZilla so I just copy the OVA file over to the  proxmox server. Switching over to the console of  my pve node I can see that the file is there. The  tool which we will use to migrate it is called qm.  

Quickly launching qm without any options shows  this help page. The two options that will be  interesting for us are importovf and import disk.  But first we need to unpack the ova file which is  in fact a simple tar file. So let’s do this by  typing tar -xvf and then the filename. Now we  can import the VM using qm importovf and give it a  new machine ID which in my case I chose to be 201,  followed by the name of the manifest file and  then we need to tell proxmox where to put it.  

Unfortunately it did not import the disk, so we  need to do this manually using the import disk  option. Same game, need to give it the ID of the  machine, the filename, the target storage plus you  can specify the target format of the disk. We can  see here that the disk has been imported. However,  on the VM it is still listed as unused. So we need  to quickly attach it by just double-clicking it or  clicking edit and checking the parameters. Once  I click on add then the hard disk is properly  attached to the right controller. Cool, let’s  start it. As we can see, Grub starts in the VM and  launches OpenWrt. Here we go, OpenWrt is up and  running in that VM and the first thing I want to  do is check the network interfaces – Like we did  in the first Virtualbox episode. So let me first  stop the VM. I need to create an internal network  as a LAN interface for the virtual router. That  can be done under network of course. I add a Linux  bridge and give it an IP, subnet and gateway.  

Next just add the two interfaces to the VM  and connect back in and – surprise –  Proxmox wants to boot the VM over PXE.  I had not checked the boot order after  having added the IDE Disk manually  so I need to do that quickly.  Here we go, restarting the VM –  and it looks like the network interfaces are up  – here we go. Just the LAN interface still has  the old Virtualbox network range but I can  change this in the OpenWrt GUI. All good. As you can see using the Open Virtual  Appliances Format OVA is a fairly easy  way of migrating complete servers from  one virtualization platform to another  like I just did from Virtualbox to Proxmox. Next  let’s just try and install a new Virtual Machine   with Windows on it. Right after this – CALL  TO ACTION. I need you to get involved. 

I would  love to hear from you if you are using  virtualization technologies like VMware,  Virtual Box, Proxmox, Docker, Kubernetes, Xen,  ESX – If yes, which one are you using and what are  doing with it ? Please do leave me a comment. Many  thanks guys ! Over to our Windows Installation. The first thing we need is an installation DVD,  an ISO file. This can be uploaded directly to  proxmox by selecting the right storage,  then content and then click on upload.  The content type of course is ISO and I just pick  a Windows 10 ISO file here. Takes a while and here  we go, it’s uploaded and appears in the list. Now  we can go ahead and create a new Virtual machine  by clicking on the blue create VM button in the  upper right corner of the Proxmox interface.  

We need to specify all the parameters such as the  operating system, the location of the ISO and of  the disk image, CPUs and Memory, attach it to the  right network. Just one thing I want to point to  because I think it’s really awesome. Proxmox can  provide access to remote display either over VNC  or over Spice. Spice is a nice way of having a  seamless remote display very much like with RDP.  I have the remote viewer installed on my system  and can now walk through the installation as if  I was sitting in front of the machine. Spice can  do much more, such as map local USB devices to  the remote machine. Very powerful. Let’s stop  that here. Installing Windows is not the main  topic of this video. I’m sure you know how to  do that. Just wanted to show how it can be done.

Great, so we can install virtually anything on  those virtual machines. But there is another  thing here in Proxmox that is very powerful.  Those are the Linux containers or LXC.  If you want to run something under Linux but it  doesn’t need a hypervisor, that means it does not  have to have its own Operating System but could  eventually use the kernel of the host machine,  then LXC might be a good fit  for you. Let’s have a look. Very much like Docker where we  have images and a docker registry  with standard images we have something  similar here which is called templates.  The command to use in order to get a  list of the available templates is pveam.  Pveam update pulls the current list of available  templates and pveam available lists them.  

I can then download them using the pveam download  command. Checking on my storage content I can see  that the container templates are available. Please  note the small size. The alpine template is only  2.3 Megabytes in size and even the full  Ubuntu 20 only accounts for 200 Megabytes.  In order to create a new container I click on the  blue Create CT icon. Here I need to type a couple  of parameters as well in the wizard such as an  Identifier number for the container, a hostname,  a root password and then I can select one of  the templates. Let’s create a real slim Ubuntu  18 machine with one CPU and 2 Gigabytes of RAM.  The wizard creates the container for me and says  Task OK – all good. I can now see the container  in my Proxmox Environment and start it. 

If I  wanted to have graphics in that container I could  even do that by installing gnome and using x2go  in order to access it remotely. But typically you  would probably rather use a container headless  and run a file server or home automation  software on it and access it over a web frontend. As we could see, the LXC virtualization is a  perfect way to run a complete Linux machine  but without the overhead of a VM. But how is this  different from Docker and why would you want to  use it ? Well, Docker is actually based on LXC. It  is basically LXC with a couple of tools around it.  

Plus you can run Docker in so called swarms  if you need for example more compute power  or if you need to serve another  thousand users. In the Enterprise  this is mostly done with Kubernetes which provides  additional clustering and scale out possibilities.  In the home environment people use  docker to run stuff in containers  and when something is broken you just scrap  the container and rebuild it. Now, the proxmox  approach to Linux containers – LXC – is much more  similar to Virtual Machines  in other words – if  you can’t get your head around Docker then this  might be the way for you to go and use container  technology. Proxmox gives a couple of additional  tools such as for example sizing the disk space  for a container with a quota. That makes sure  that a container doesn’t grow above its limits.

Awesome, guys – that’s all I wanted to show you  today. In the next episode I will use proxmox  in order to migrate my old home server  into a virtual machine on proxmox  on the new server – so I will show how to  virtualize a physical machine. Until then,  many thanks for watching, liking  and subscribing. Please do not forget  to leave me a thumbs up and a comment.  Stay safe, stay healthy, bye for now.