Installing Proxmox VE

Proxmox VE is a hypervisor: instead of installing one system on the machine, you install something that runs several systems on it. An Ubuntu VM for your containers, another to experiment with, a lightweight container for your ad blocker, and a button that photographs the whole lot before you break it.

It is the most used system in home labs, and it is not the one this site's builder recommends. Both positions hold — let us work out which one is yours.

Is it for you?

Take Ubuntu Server + Docker if you want to run services. It is simpler, it is better documented, and a machine with 8 GB of RAM gives all of it to your applications. That is this site's default recommendation, for a reason that has nothing to do with technology: one system everywhere means a guide, a forum answer and a Stack Overflow thread all describe the machine in front of you.

Take Proxmox if at least one of these sentences is about you:

• You want several systems on one machine — Ubuntu for Docker, Windows for software that exists nowhere else, OPNsense for the network.
• You want to break things safely. A snapshot before a risky change, and a ten-second rollback, is what Proxmox does best.
• You want to pass hardware through to a VM: a graphics card for transcoding, a network card, a disk controller.
• You have 32 GB of RAM or more and something to spread across it.

Do not take it if you have 8 GB of RAM or less, or if this is your first server: you would be adding a layer to understand before understanding the one underneath, and every problem would now have two places to hide.

Proxmox VE is free software under the AGPL. The paid subscription buys access to a more heavily tested package repository and to support; without it, everything works.

What you need

• A 64-bit machine with hardware virtualisation enabled in the BIOS: look for Intel VT-x, VT-d, or AMD-V and AMD IOMMU. Without it, Proxmox installs but VMs crawl.
• 8 GB of RAM as a hard minimum, 16 to make it worthwhile, 32 to be comfortable.
• A USB stick of at least 2 GB, whose contents will be erased.
• An Ethernet cable. Proxmox does not configure Wi-Fi during installation.
• A whole disk for the system. Proxmox erases it completely.

Step 1 — Download and verify the image

The ISO is at proxmox.com/downloads. As of 28 July 2026 the current file is proxmox-ve_9.2-1.iso, about 1.5 GB. Proxmox VE 9 is built on Debian 13 "Trixie" — worth knowing, because all Debian documentation applies underneath.

sha256sum proxmox-ve_9.2-1.iso

Must print:

4e88fe416df9b527624a175f24c9aa07c714d3332afb1ee3dbf3879573ef2c6c

That checksum comes from enterprise.proxmox.com/iso/SHA256SUMS, which is authoritative: if yours differs, compare against that file rather than this page — the ISO changes with each point release.

Step 2 — Write the stick and boot from it

Same method as any ISO: balenaEtcher, or from the command line after identifying the stick with lsblk:

sudo dd if=proxmox-ve_9.2-1.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync

/dev/sdX is the whole stick, never a partition. A mistake here wipes a disk without asking.

At boot, choose Install Proxmox VE (Graphical). If the screen stays black or the display falls apart, the (Terminal UI) entry in the same menu does the same job in text.

Step 3 — The installer

Target disk. This is the screen worth pausing on, because the Options button hides the only hard choice of the installation.

• ext4 — one disk, simple, nothing to understand. The right choice if you are hesitating.
• ZFS (RAID1) — two identical disks mirrored. You survive a dead drive, you get filesystem-level snapshots, and silent corruption gets caught. In return, ZFS wants RAM: budget 4 GB for it, plus whatever your VMs need.
• ZFS (RAID0) or LVM — for specific cases. If you do not know whether yours is one, it is not.

In the options, hdsize limits how much the system takes. On a 500 GB disk dedicated to the system, leave the default: Proxmox uses the rest for VM images.

Country, timezone, keyboard. The keyboard matters: the password that comes next is typed now and read back at every login.

Password and email. The password is root's, and it is access to the whole machine. The email address is for notifications — use yours, it is how Proxmox will tell you a backup failed.

Network. The screen wants a fully qualified hostname: it needs a dot. pve.home works, pve is rejected.

Give it a static IP right now — the installer offers no DHCP, and that is correct: a hypervisor that changes address is a hypervisor you cannot find. Write it down, it is the address of your web interface.

Then the install runs, five to ten minutes. Remove the stick before it reboots.

Step 4 — First connection

From a browser on the local network:

https://192.168.1.50:8006

Three things will surprise you, and none is a problem:

• Port 8006, not 443. You have to type it.
• https, mandatory. Over http, nothing answers.
• A browser security warning. The certificate is self-signed: Proxmox cannot get a trusted one for a private IP address. Go through it — this is your machine, on your network.

Username root, the password from the install, and Realm set to Linux PAM standard authentication.

A message will tell you that you have no valid subscription. It is a reminder, not a limitation: everything works. The next step deals with it.

Step 5 — Repositories, or nothing ever updates

This is the step not to skip, and the one most guides rush.

At install time Proxmox enables the enterprise repository, which requires a subscription key. Without a key, every apt update fails with a 401 — and your hypervisor stops receiving security updates, silently, for months.

Two commands over SSH, or in Node → Shell in the web interface.

Disable the enterprise repository — Proxmox documents exactly this method, which has the advantage of surviving package updates:

echo "Enabled: no" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.sources

Enable the no-subscription one:

cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/proxmox.sources <<'EOF'
Types: deb
URIs: http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve
Suites: trixie
Components: pve-no-subscription
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/proxmox-archive-keyring.gpg
EOF

apt update && apt full-upgrade -y

trixie is the Debian 13 codename PVE 9 is built on. On a future Proxmox release that word changes: the repositories page is the authority.

The no-subscription repository is, in Proxmox's own words, "not recommended for production". For a home lab, it is what everyone uses. If you want the tested repository and to support the project, the entry-level subscription is billed per CPU per year — see their pricing page.

The subscription reminder at login stays. That is the price of free software funded by the people who pay for it.

Step 6 — VM or container?

Proxmox offers two ways to run something, and the choice is made once per use case.

A VM (KVM) emulates a complete machine with its own kernel. That is what you need for a different system — Windows, BSD, OPNsense — for hardware passthrough, and for anything you genuinely want isolated. It costs a few hundred megabytes of RAM and a full boot.

A container (LXC) shares the host's kernel. It starts in a second, it consumes what the software consumes, and it resizes while running. In return it is Linux only, and the isolation is thinner.

The simple rule: one Ubuntu VM to put Docker in, and LXCs for small services you do not want to containerise.

And above all: do not run Docker inside an LXC. It works, roughly, until the day it does not — permissions, networking, mounts — and you will look inside Docker for a problem that comes from LXC. A VM for Docker costs 512 MB of RAM and saves you an evening.

Step 7 — Your first Ubuntu VM

Upload the ISO. In the left tree: local (pve) → ISO Images → Upload. Or faster, Download from URL with the Ubuntu Server ISO address — the machine fetches it itself, at its own speed.

Create VM, top right. The screens, and what matters in each:

• General — a name.
• OS — the ISO you uploaded.
• System — tick Qemu Agent. It lets Proxmox shut the VM down cleanly and know its IP address. We install it inside at the next step.
• Disks — 32 GB is enough for Ubuntu + Docker without data. Tick Discard if the host disk is an SSD: without it, space freed inside the VM is never returned to the physical disk.
• CPU — 2 cores to start. Set Type to host: the VM then sees the real processor and its instruction sets. Without it, some software runs noticeably slower for no visible reason.
• Memory — 4 GB. Untick Ballooning if you want RAM genuinely reserved.
• Network — leave vmbr0: it is the bridge to your network, and the VM will get an address like any other machine.

Start it, open Console, and install Ubuntu — Installing Ubuntu Server applies as-is. Once inside:

sudo apt install -y qemu-guest-agent
sudo systemctl enable --now qemu-guest-agent

Proxmox then shows the VM's IP in its summary, and knows how to shut it down properly.

Step 8 — Backups, right now

This is what Proxmox does best, and it costs you minutes to set up.

Datacenter → Backup → Add. Pick the storage, the schedule — daily, at night — and Snapshot mode, which backs up a running VM without stopping it. Under Retention, keep seven daily and four weekly: with no limit, your disk fills up and you find out at the worst possible moment.

A backup on the same disk as the VMs protects you from nothing but your own mistakes. An external USB disk mounted under Datacenter → Storage, or a network share, changes what the protection means.

And the manual snapshot before anything risky: VM → Snapshots → Take Snapshot. Ten seconds, and a rollback available. It is the reason people install Proxmox on a machine that will only ever run one VM.

What will surprise you

"No valid subscription". A reminder, at every login. Nothing is limited.

Updates do not install. You skipped step 5. Check under Node → Repositories that pve-no-subscription is active and the enterprise one is not.

Storage local is full while local-lvm is empty. They are two different spaces: local holds ISOs, templates and backups; local-lvm holds VM disks. A 4 GB ISO in a 100 GB local fills up faster than you think.

A VM refuses to start, with a message about KVM. Hardware virtualisation is off in the BIOS. It is the one prerequisite that genuinely blocks.

The web interface stops answering after a network change. vmbr0 is a bridge; editing it from the web interface saws off the branch you are sitting on. Plug a screen back in and fix /etc/network/interfaces on the spot.

Next

An Ubuntu VM, Docker inside, and you are back to exactly what this site's builder recommends — with an undo button on top.

That is Proxmox's real argument for a home lab: not virtualisation itself, but the right to get it wrong.