The installation of a Proxmox node is very straightforward. Simply accept the default options, select localization, and enter the network information to install Proxmox VE. We can summarize the installation process in the following steps:

Although the basic installation works in all scenarios, there may be times when the advanced installation option may be necessary. Only the advanced installation option provides you the ability to customize the main OS drive.

A common practice for the operating system drive is to use a mirror RAID array using a controller interface. This provides drive redundancy if one of the drives fails. This same level of redundancy can also be achieved using a software-based RAID array, such as ZFS. Proxmox now offers options to select ZFS-based arrays for the operating system drive right at the beginning of the installation. For details on ZFS, if you are not familiar with it, refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS.

Besides ZFS, we can also select other filesystem types, such as ext3, ext4, or xfs, from the same advanced option. We can also set the custom disk or partition sizes through the advanced option. The following screenshot shows the installation interface with the Target Harddisk selection page:

Click on Options, as shown in the preceding screenshot, to open the advanced option for the Hard disk. The following screenshot shows the options window after clicking on the Options button:

In the preceding screenshot, we selected ZFS RAID1 for mirroring and the two drives, Harddisk 0 and Harddisk 1 respectively, to install Proxmox. If we pick one of the filesystems such as ext3, ext4, or xfs instead of ZFS, the Harddisk options dialog box will look like the following screenshot, that is, with different set of options:

Selecting a filesystem gives us the following advanced options:

Debugging features are part of any good operating system. Proxmox has debugging features that will help you during a failed installation. Some common reasons are unsupported hardware, conflicts between devices, ISO image errors, and so on. Debugging mode logs and displays installation activities in real time. When the standard installation fails, we can start the Proxmox installation in debug mode from the main installation interface, as shown in the following screenshot:

The debug installation mode will drop us in the following prompt. To start the installation, we need to press Ctrl + D. When there is an error during the installation, we can simply press Ctrl + C to get back to this console to continue with our investigation:

From the console, we can check the installation log using the following command:

# cat /tmp/install.log

From the main installation menu, we can also press e to enter edit mode to change the loader information, as shown in the following screenshot:

At times, it may be necessary to edit the loader information when normal booting does not function. This is a common case when Proxmox is unable to show the video output due to UEFI or a non-supported resolution. In such cases, the booting process may hang. One way to continue with booting is to add the nomodeset argument by editing the loader. The loader will look as follows after editing:

linux/boot/linux26 ro ramdisk_size=16777216 rw quiet nomodeset

When building a custom Proxmox solution, it may be necessary to change the default blue splash screen to something more appealing in order to identify the company or department the server belongs to. In this section, we will see how easily we can integrate any image as the splash screen background.

The splash screen image must be in the .tga format and must have fixed standard sizes, such as 640 x 480, 800 x 600, or 1024 x 768. If you do not have any image software that supports the .tga format, you can easily convert an jpg, gif, or png image to the .tga format using a free online image converter (http://image.online-convert.com/convert-to-tga).

Once the desired image is ready in the .tga format, the following steps will integrate the image as the Proxmox splash screen:

The following screenshot shows an example of how the splash screen may look after we add a custom image to it:

Picture courtesy of www.techcitynews.com

We can also change the font color to make it properly visible, depending on the custom image used. To change the font color, edit the debian theme file in /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme, and find the following line of code:

set_background_image "${GRUB_BACKGROUND}" || set_default_theme

Edit the line to add the font color, as shown in the following format. In our example, we have changed the font color to black and highlighted the font color to light blue:

set_background_image "${GRUB_BACKGROUND}" "black/black" "light-blue/black" || set_default_theme

After making the necessary changes, update grub, and reboot to see the changes.

In this chapter, we looked at why Proxmox is a good option as a hypervisor, what advanced installation options are available during an installation, and why we choose software-based RAID for the operating system drive. We also looked at the cost of Proxmox, storage options, and network flexibility using Open vSwitch. We learned the presence of the debugging features and customization options of the Proxmox splash screen.

In next chapter, we will take a closer look at the Proxmox GUI and see how easy it is to centrally manage a Proxmox cluster from a web browser.