Reasons to Install PVE ontop of Debian Stable?

jsterr

Renowned Member
Jul 24, 2020
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Hi there,

what are some concrete reasons to install pve ontop of debian stable instead of using the basic installer of proxmox? https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_12_Bookworm


One thing might be: Installation on ZFS including LUKS for boot. Does someone have experience in that? Are there any other reasons, I might not be aware of?

Thanks
Jonas
 
I have recently had a genuine need to install Proxmox into an existing Debian system. But this is bound to be one of the craziest edge cases. I wanted to run Proxmox on my Chromebook. Modern Chromebooks can come with surprisingly powerful CPUs, and you can easily upgrade storage to at least 2TB. So, it isn't quite as crazy as it might sound at first. ChromeOS has a built-in Linux VM that runs Debian in a container. If you turn on "nesting" for this container, it is sufficiently privileged that it can run Proxmox with only minor restrictions. Of course, you wouldn't want to do any clustering, but for managing local VMs and containers, Proxmox does great in this use case.

Getting everything to work correctly and to integrate properly with ChromeOS takes some tweaking of setting though, and the network topology is quite challenging to get right. That's where having a full Debian system really shines. This is not something that Proxmox knows how to do out of the box.
 
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Here's one use case:

Install Debian 12 with a GUI, and then Proxmox on top of it.
Manage Proxmox from a web broswer inside the Debian GUI.

Now you have access to the full PVE management web interface even if you fry your network config.

The downside is that the GUI ties up a lot of hardware resources and can cause unintended consequences when you're doing other things. But if you've got a beefy system and are careful about what you're doing (or are using a very lightweight GUI), it could work. If there was a known stable way to do this, it might actually be a better option for home users just getting started, so they can learn Proxmox without having to also learn how to manage a Debian server with no GUI.