The installer ISO image includes the following:
All existing data on the for installation selected drives will be removed during the installation process. The installer does not add boot menu entries for other operating systems.
Please insert the prepared installation media Section 2.2, “Prepare Installation Media” (for example, USB flash drive or CD-ROM) and boot from it.
Make sure that booting from the installation medium (for example, USB) is enabled in your servers firmware settings.
After choosing the correct entry (e.g. Boot from USB) the Proxmox VE menu will be displayed and one of the following options can be selected:
It’s possible to use the installation wizard with a keyboard only. Buttons
can be clicked by pressing the ALT
key combined with the underlined character
from the respective button. For example, ALT + N
to press a Next
button.
CTRL-D
. This option can be used to boot a live
system with all basic tools available. You can use it, for example, to
repair a degraded ZFS rpool
Section 3.8, “ZFS on Linux” or fix the
bootloader
Section 3.12, “Host Bootloader” for an existing Proxmox VE setup.
memtest86+
. This is useful to check if the memory is functional and free
of errors.
After selecting Install Proxmox VE and accepting the EULA, the prompt to select the
target hard disk(s) will appear. The Options
button opens the dialog to select
the target file system.
The default file system is ext4
. The Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is used when
ext4
or xfs
is selected. Additional options to restrict LVM space
can also be set (see below).
Proxmox VE can be installed on ZFS. As ZFS offers several software RAID levels, this
is an option for systems that don’t have a hardware RAID controller. The target
disks must be selected in the Options
dialog. More ZFS specific settings can
be changed under Advanced Options
(see below).
ZFS on top of any hardware RAID is not supported and can result in data loss.
The next page asks for basic configuration options like the location, the time zone, and keyboard layout. The location is used to select a download server close by to speed up updates. The installer usually auto-detects these settings. They only need to be changed in the rare case that auto detection fails or a different keyboard layout should be used.
Next the password of the superuser (root) and an email address needs to be specified. The password must consist of at least 5 characters. It’s highly recommended to use a stronger password. Some guidelines are:
The email address is used to send notifications to the system administrator. For example:
The last step is the network configuration. Please note that during installation you can either use an IPv4 or IPv6 address, but not both. To configure a dual stack node, add additional IP addresses after the installation.
The next step shows a summary of the previously selected options. Re-check every
setting and use the Previous
button if a setting needs to be changed. To
accept, press Install
. The installation starts to format disks and copies
packages to the target. Please wait until this step has finished; then remove
the installation medium and restart your system.
If the installation failed check out specific errors on the second TTY (‘CTRL + ALT + F2’), ensure that the systems meets the minimum requirements Section 2.1.1, “Minimum Requirements, for Evaluation”. If the installation is still not working look at the how to get help chapter Section 1.10, “Getting Help”.
Further configuration is done via the Proxmox web interface. Point your browser to the IP address given during installation (https://youripaddress:8006).
Default login is "root" (realm PAM) and the root password is defined during the installation process.
The installer creates a Volume Group (VG) called pve
, and additional Logical
Volumes (LVs) called root
, data
, and swap
. To control the size of these
volumes use:
hdsize
swapsize
Defines the size of the swap
volume. The default is the size of the installed
memory, minimum 4 GB and maximum 8 GB. The resulting value cannot be greater
than hdsize/8
.
If set to 0
, no swap
volume will be created.
maxroot
root
volume, which stores the operation
system. The maximum limit of the root
volume size is hdsize/4
.
maxvz
Defines the maximum size of the data
volume. The actual size of the data
volume is:
datasize = hdsize - rootsize - swapsize - minfree
Where datasize
cannot be bigger than maxvz
.
In case of LVM thin, the data
pool will only be created if datasize
is
bigger than 4GB.
If set to 0
, no data
volume will be created and the storage
configuration will be adapted accordingly.
minfree
Defines the amount of free space left in the LVM volume group pve
. With more
than 128GB storage available the default is 16GB, else hdsize/8
will be used.
LVM requires free space in the VG for snapshot creation (not required for lvmthin snapshots).
The installer creates the ZFS pool rpool
. No swap space is created but you can
reserve some unpartitioned space on the install disks for swap. You can also
create a swap zvol after the installation, although this can lead to problems.
(see ZFS swap notes).
ashift
ashift
value for the created pool. The ashift
needs to be set at
least to the sector-size of the underlying disks (2 to the power of ashift
is
the sector-size), or any disk which might be put in the pool (for example the
replacement of a defective disk).
compress
rpool
.
checksum
rpool
.
copies
copies
parameter for rpool
. Check the zfs(8)
manpage for the
semantics, and why this does not replace redundancy on disk-level.
hdsize
hdsize
is only honored for bootable disks, that is only the
first disk or mirror for RAID0, RAID1 or RAID10, and all disks in RAID-Z[123].
ZFS works best with a lot of memory. If you intend to use ZFS make sure to have enough RAM available for it. A good calculation is 4GB plus 1GB RAM for each TB RAW disk space.
ZFS can use a dedicated drive as write cache, called the ZFS Intent Log (ZIL). Use a fast drive (SSD) for it. It can be added after installation with the following command:
# zpool add <pool-name> log </dev/path_to_fast_ssd>