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I've been using VMware ESXi for a long time. For me, it was simply the best choice for bare metal virtualization. And I was very happy with it: the interface was light, there were powerful features, even the licenses were flexible enough to be used in test environments. There were no subscription licenses. In short, everything you'd expect from such software. But that… That was before Broadcom tool over.
I won't rehash the story, but basically, it stinks to high heaven, and it's only getting worse. So I decided to move on to another solution, and that's what I'm going to detail in a series of tutorials dedicated to Proxmox.
I chose Proxmox for several reasons: it's free (you can subscribe to a paid package to get support and more stable versions, but also to support the project), opensource, very powerful, flexible and last but not least, it's not managed by Broadcom. Of course, as with any migration or change of solution, you'll need to study the changes and features you'll gain/lose from one solution to another beforehand. Although Proxmox meets all my needs, I'm well aware that it's not as complete as VMware.
The first of these tutorials - since I'm going to start at the beginning - will be devoted to installing Proxmox.
The first step is to connect to the official Proxmox web page: https://www.proxmox.com/en/downloads and download the Proxmox VE ISO Installer.
Next, you can either burn a CD (do we still do that?), use a USB tool like Rufus, create a bootable drive with dd on Unix-like systems, or mount the ISO via iDRAC Enterprise Manager if installing on a Dell server (which is my case!). Many examples of media preparation on the official wiki: https://pve.proxmox.com/.
Let's say we're in a situation where we have two physical network interfaces. Once installed, Proxmox will give them respective names using the systemd naming convention (see: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Network_Configuration).
Concerning storage, wishing to use ZFS I configured my PERC controller (Dell hardware RAID) in HBA mode. From the Proxmox installer I would then create a ZFS RAID1 (mirror) on which I would install the system (Proxmox hypervisor). I would then configure my four other disks with the file system as RAID10 ZFS, reserved for virtual machines. It's important to understand that the best way to use the ZFS file system is with an HBA adapter, not a hardware RAID. This is because the system must work directly with the disk (see here: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/ZFS_on_Linux). So if you have a PERC card (as I do), and you want to use ZFS, you should consider converting from RAID mode to HBA mode as explained here: https://www.dell.com/.
Let's move on to installation. As we shall see, this is a fairly straightforward process.
If, like me, you don't have a subscription, you may want to disable enterprise repositories (which needs valid licencing) and enable no-subscription repositories.
Note: For companies, it's still a good idea to have a valid subscription.
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