PXE-Based Proxmox Installation & Cluster Automation Solutions

[hkmajed]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently working on automating the installation of Proxmox on bare-metal servers using PXE boot. The solution also includes post-installation configuration and automatic cluster joining using Ansible.

If anyone has worked on a similar setup before and is willing to share their approach or resources, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Thank you in advance!

 

[hkmajed]

Hi all,
I'm trying to set up automated Proxmox VE 8.3 installations via PXE boot. Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

• I extracted linux26 and initrd from the Proxmox ISO and placed them in /var/lib/tftpboot for PXE booting.
• The client successfully loads the kernel (linux26) and initrd via PXE, and the boot process starts.
• However, the installation does not proceed — it stalls or drops to a shell.

As a workaround, I tried extracting the initrd directly from the ISO (proxmox-ve_8.3-1.iso), but the resulting initrd file is around 1.6 GB, which exceeds the typical size limit for TFTP/PXELINUX. This results in errors like “I/O error” or “wrong argument” during PXE boot.

I suspect the issue is related to how the Proxmox installer expects the full ISO or filesystem to be available during boot, or that the initrd is too large for the PXE bootloader to handle.

If I misunderstood anything about how PXE handles large initrd files or how Proxmox expects the installer environment to be set up, please feel free to correct me.

Has anyone successfully set up full unattended Proxmox installs over PXE using either TFTP or HTTP? Any advice or examples would be greatly appreciated.