Having recently installed 6 nodes for Proxmox I figured out a way to make it a lot simpler to do if you didn't want to use the Proxmox ISO image. I didn't personally because of the partitioning decisions made. Now I'm new to Proxmox but have been using Linux for going on 30 years, mainly on Debian. I wanted this as the nodes are now part of a Ceph cluster and so the VM datastore part of the drives wasn't something I wanted on the OS drives. It was easier to leave the large NVMe SSDs out of it until the Proxmox cluster was up and running and then assign them as Ceph OSDs
I thought I'd share the scripts I used to install Proxmox consistently and quickly on all 6 nodes. Nothing too dramatic, basically putting the steps in the Wiki article in to script form for simpler usage.
Steps:
Install Debian 12 with your preferred RAID1 setup for the OS drives and appropriate swap and root partitions. Note, only select 'SSH server' and 'standard tools' (the bottom two choices on the installer) when selecting software. You don't want a lot of packages on the base nodes.
When configuring network, even if DHCP succeeds, go back a step and 'Configure manually' - At this time, set the STATIC IP you want for the node along with your appropriate network configuration (gateway, DNS etc). The reason I say do a static IP now is it really made a difference how the GUI came up. I had a lot of trouble if I went with DHCP on the host because then the /etc/hosts file would not have the host IP address and that is something that is critical for the operation of Proxmox. Doing static IPs from the very start avoided all the issues I had.
Complete the install and install the GRUB bootloader to both of your SSDs. If one fails, you still need to be able to boot the node.
Once the new system as booted up, copy over to your unprivileged user's home directory the attached scripts*
As root on your new system
You'll get 'now reboot' if the script was successful. Go ahead and type 'reboot'
Then once the node boots up again:
Do a 'reboot' again.
Once the system is booted up, the URL for your Proxmox GUI will be shown on the login banner message
e.g. https://<the IP you chose for the node>:8006/
You can then join the node to your cluster and be off and going!
* The scripts are attached as text files for the forum. You can leave the .txt extension or remove it once you get them over to your Linux systems.
* As with any 'scripts' you find on the internet, you should read it first to make sure you agree with the content BEFORE running anything on your system, especially as a privileged user.
I thought I'd share the scripts I used to install Proxmox consistently and quickly on all 6 nodes. Nothing too dramatic, basically putting the steps in the Wiki article in to script form for simpler usage.
Steps:
Install Debian 12 with your preferred RAID1 setup for the OS drives and appropriate swap and root partitions. Note, only select 'SSH server' and 'standard tools' (the bottom two choices on the installer) when selecting software. You don't want a lot of packages on the base nodes.
When configuring network, even if DHCP succeeds, go back a step and 'Configure manually' - At this time, set the STATIC IP you want for the node along with your appropriate network configuration (gateway, DNS etc). The reason I say do a static IP now is it really made a difference how the GUI came up. I had a lot of trouble if I went with DHCP on the host because then the /etc/hosts file would not have the host IP address and that is something that is critical for the operation of Proxmox. Doing static IPs from the very start avoided all the issues I had.
Complete the install and install the GRUB bootloader to both of your SSDs. If one fails, you still need to be able to boot the node.
Once the new system as booted up, copy over to your unprivileged user's home directory the attached scripts*
As root on your new system
Code:
chmod +x proxmoxinstall_part1 proxmoxinstall_part2
Code:
./proxmoxinstall_part1You'll get 'now reboot' if the script was successful. Go ahead and type 'reboot'
Then once the node boots up again:
Code:
./proxmoxinstall_part2Do a 'reboot' again.
Once the system is booted up, the URL for your Proxmox GUI will be shown on the login banner message
e.g. https://<the IP you chose for the node>:8006/
You can then join the node to your cluster and be off and going!
* The scripts are attached as text files for the forum. You can leave the .txt extension or remove it once you get them over to your Linux systems.
* As with any 'scripts' you find on the internet, you should read it first to make sure you agree with the content BEFORE running anything on your system, especially as a privileged user.