From installing Proxmox VE to VMs, containers, storage, networking, backups, a three-node cluster (phoebe, priscilla and stephen), moving guests between the nodes and passing through the built-in GPU, one step at a time.
This is the first part of Proxmox from scratch. By the end of it you
have a server running Proxmox Virtual Environment, reachable from a
browser and up to date. The following parts build on it: virtual
machines, containers, storage, networking and backups.
Everything here is done on Proxmox VE 9.2, which came out in May 2026
[7]. If you find an older guide for version 8, be aware that
8 stopped getting security updates on 31 August 2026 [7].
This is the second part of Proxmox from scratch. In part 1 we installed Proxmox VE on a small PC. Now we put it to use and create the first virtual machine.
A virtual machine, or VM, is a whole computer made of software. It has its own virtual disk, memory, processor and network card, and you install an operating system in it the same way you would on a real PC. That makes it the right place for things you don’t want on your own PC, like a test build of a desktop that may well have bugs. That is what I install in mine: the testing edition of KDE neon. I chose it on purpose, because it lets me try the coming Plasma releases before they come out, without risking the desktop I use every day.
This is the third part of Proxmox from scratch. In part 2 we created a virtual machine. This time we make the other kind of guest, a container, and I show how I run my own services in them.
The container in this post is a real one: the one that will run Jellyfin on my main server, phoebe, in the coming Jellyfin at home series. The screenshots are from the evening I created it.
This is the fourth part of Proxmox from scratch. In part 2 and part 3 we created a virtual machine and a container, and both times I put their disks on a storage called vmdatanvme and promised to explain it later. This is later.
The post has two halves. The first is a tour: how Proxmox thinks about storage, and the kinds it can use, from a folder on the server’s own disk to Ceph spread over several servers. The second is what I do on my own servers, and here there is a twist. In part 7 my servers become a cluster, and in part 8 guests move between them. For that to work, the storage has to be set up the same way on every server, and that is easiest to get right now, before there is a cluster.
