Project Reasoning

In my RAID 5 project, I briefly mentioned the prospect of utilising my remaining Hard Drives deploy a hypervisor (Proxmox). The reason I went with Proxmox, was down to the fact that it is open source, and supports many features that would be found in an enterprise hypervisor. My plan was to use this as my home lab (server) to experiment with operating systems, deploy web applications, create storage shares and install network management tools.

Configuring the Drives

The drives used for the were 2X 500GB Hard drives which were configured in a RAID 1 mirror using the default Hardware RAID controller on my HP Z600. My concern was less about speed and more about redundancy, which is why I avoided RAID 0.

Installing Proxmox

The first step involved download downloading the ISO installer and flashed the image onto a USB. From here I was able to navigate to the bootable media and begin the installation process. The process fairly uninvolved, and I was only require to select the drives for the installation, set up the root credentials and assign the network configuration.

Configuring Proxmox

Once Proxmox was installed, there was some configuration that needed to be done within the web UI. I could not use more installation drives, so I needed to create a new storage pool using the drives I set up in an earlier RAID configuration (see here). This storage pool could now be used to set up virtual Hard Drives for my VMs.

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