Learn how to – How To Install Proxmox VE 7 on OVH Dedicated Server

Learn how to – How To Install Proxmox VE 7 on OVH Dedicated Server.

OVHcloud has a special offering for dedicated servers that is based on bare-metal technology. Bare-metal infrastructure is suitable if you have serious workloads such as data processing with intense memory and CPU requirements. It is also suitable for lighter applications such as website hosting, and deployment of high-resilience infrastructure. For custom applications with special hardware requirements like GPU, it is more ideal to request for dedicated hardware as opposed to VM based operations.

In this article we will cover a step-by-step installation and configuration of Proxmox VE on OVH Dedicated / Bare-metal Server. Proxmox VE is an enterprise-class virtualization platform based on open source tools such as KVM and LXC containers. It ships with a powerful web management interface that has user, storage, compute, network management functionalities.

Step 1: Request for dedicated server on OVH

Login to OVH Cloud using your account credentials and check their dedicated server ranges. Choose a server that’s suitable for your use and complete the order.

Configure your server with desired hardware specifications. Notice there will be a cost implication to the options you choose.

Confirm the order and make the payment to complete it.

Choose Debian 11 template when provisioning operating system on the server.

Step 2: Request at least one additional IP address

We’ll need at least one Additional IP address attached to our dedicated server. This will be used by the Virtual Machines running in Proxmox VE. Additional IP addresses can be easily assigned and moved from one service to another, and are available in 2 different formats:

• Individual address (/32)
• IP address block (up to /24)

We’ll order /29 which comes with 6 usable IP addresses.

Step 3: Install Proxmox VE on OVHCloud Dedicated Server

Login to your OVH Dedicated server using set credentials. Update your system and upgrade.

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y
[ -f /var/run/reboot-required ] && sudo reboot -f

Set server hostname before you proceed further.

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname pve.ownyourlife.com.ng --static

Edit the /etc/hosts file on the server and map server’s public ip address to the hostname. Also include pvelocalhost at the end of the line.

$ sudo vim /etc/hosts
147.125.45.42	pve.ownyourlife.com.ng pvelocalhost pve

Confirm hostname to IP address mapping after writing changes to the file.

$ hostname --ip-address
147.125.45.42

Next we add Proxmox VE repository to the system.

echo "deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve bullseye pve-no-subscription" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-install-repo.list

Import GPG keys used for package signing.

wget http://download.proxmox.com/debian/proxmox-release-bullseye.gpg
sudo mv proxmox-release-bullseye.gpg /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/proxmox-release-bullseye.gpg
chmod +r /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/proxmox-release-bullseye.gpg

Perform another check if any new packages are available in the repository we just addded.

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

The last task in this step is installation of Proxmox VE packages on Debian OS.

sudo apt install proxmox-ve postfix open-iscsi

Perform a system reboot to use Proxmox.

sudo systemctl reboot

Proxmox VE Proxy ( a web service) listens on TCP port 8006:

$ ss -tunelp | grep 8006
tcp   LISTEN 0      4096                *:8006             *:*    uid:33 ino:25414 sk:18 cgroup:/system.slice/pveproxy.service v6only:0 <->

You can connect to Proxmox VE admin web console on (https://youripaddress:8006).

Select “PAM Authentication” and authenticate with server’s root user password. If you don’t have root password reset it using ssh session.

sudo passwd root

If you don’t admire default Proxmox UI theme, you can change it by following the steps in the following guide.

• How To Customize Proxmox VE Web UI With dark theme

Step 4: Perform Network configurations on Proxmox

Move the current network configuration file to root user home directory.

sudo mv /etc/network/interfaces.d/50-cloud-init /root

Check the name of your primary interface.

root@pve:~# ip link show
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: eno1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq master vmbr0 state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:25:90:8b:18:2c brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    altname enp6s0f0

Set static network configurations using original server IP address assigned via DHCP.

$ sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces
# Update configurations for eno1 interface
auto eno1
iface eno1 inet manual
iface eno1 inet static
  address 147.125.45.42
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  gateway 147.125.45.254

On the same file create first bridge called vmbr0

#Create vmbr0 Bridge
auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
 address 147.125.45.42
 netmask 255.255.255.255
 bridge_ports eno1
 bridge_stp off
 bridge_fd 0
 post-up route add 147.125.45.254 dev vmbr0
 post-up route add default gw 147.125.45.254

Replace:

• 147.125.45.42 with your server’s primary IP address
• 147.125.45.254 with gateway IP address. Usually similar to Primary IP address but with .254

Reboot the server after making the changes to confirm it can boot with new network settings and is accessible.

sudo reboot

Step 5: Create virtual MAC address for Additional IP

Before you can use any additional IP address on your Proxmox VE instances, the following basic steps must be performed.

• creating a virtual MAC address for an Additional IP
• setting the MAC of the VM to that new virtual MAC address
• configuring the IP address, netmask, gateway and route to the gateway inside the VM

We’ll demonstrate this operations using the following additional IPs network setup.

• Network Subnet: 51.81.222.20/29
• Network IP :51.81.222.20
• Broadcast IP :51.81.222.27
• Gateway IP :51.81.222.26
• Netmask :255.255.255.248

1. Create a virtual MAC address

Log in to the OVHcloud Control Panel, go to the Bare Metal Cloud section and open the IP menu. You should see “My public IP addresses and associated services“.

Under each of the additional IP addresses, click on ... to open the context menu, and select Add a virtual MAC.

Choose ovh from the “Type” drop-down menu. Type a name in the “Name of virtual machine” field, and click on Confirm.

2. Setting MAC of the VM to virtual MAC address generated

Upload OS ISO image for installing a Virtual Machine.

You can set virtual MAC address at the time of OS installation under

After the Virtual Machine is created in Proxmox, you can as well power it off, then right-click the VM and click Edit settingsto set MAC address.

• Select the VM.
• Open the Hardware section.
• Select Network Device.
• Click the Edit button.

Add the vMAC address created previously for the IP address to be assigned the Virtual Machine.

3. Configure IP address, netmask, gateway inside the VM

We’ll consider network configuration the the following VMs.

1. Ubuntu OS

On Ubuntu you can configure network settings using netplan.

ubuntu@postal-01:~$ sudo vim cat /etc/netplan/00-installer-config.yaml
network:
  ethernets:
    ens18:
      addresses:
      - 51.81.222.21/29
      gateway4: 51.81.222.26
      nameservers:
        addresses:
        - 8.8.8.8
        search: []
  version: 2

Apply network comfigurations.

ubuntu@postal-01:~$ sudo netplan apply

Check new IP address as configured.

ubuntu@postal-01:~$ ip ad
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: ens18: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 02:00:00:9f:db:be brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 51.81.222.21/29 brd 51.81.222.27 scope global ens18
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::ff:fe9f:dbbe/64 scope link
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

Test network connectivity using ping.

ubuntu@postal-01:~$ ping -c 3 google.com
PING google.com (142.250.217.110) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from sea09s30-in-f14.1e100.net (142.250.217.110): icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=4.43 ms
64 bytes from sea09s30-in-f14.1e100.net (142.250.217.110): icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=4.50 ms
64 bytes from sea09s30-in-f14.1e100.net (142.250.217.110): icmp_seq=3 ttl=54 time=4.47 ms

--- google.com ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 4.427/4.462/4.495/0.027 ms

2. Debian system

You can edit the default network configurations file.

sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces

Add appropriate configs

# add network static settings
iface enp1s0 inet static
  address 51.81.222.22
  network 51.81.222.20
  netmask 255.255.255.248
  broadcast 51.81.222.27
  gateway 51.81.222.26
  dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8

Restart interface.

sudo systemctl restart ifup@enp1s0

Confirm network configurations using ip

ip address

3. CentOS / Rocky / RHEL system

Assuming the network interface name is eth0, the network script configurations will be similar to this;

$ sudo vim /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
DEVICE=eth0
TYPE=Ethernet
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
IPADDR=51.81.222.24
NETMASK=255.255.255.248
GATEWAY=51.81.222.26
DNS2=8.8.8.8

Restart network interface to confirm the settings.

sudo ifdown eth0 && sudo ifup eth0

Test external connectivity on your VM instance.

Conclusion

To this end we’ve demonstrated how you can order a bare metal server on OVH Cloud, install Debian OS, and deploy Proxmox Virtualization Environment on it. We further covered how you’ll order an additional public IP address block for use within the virtualization environment. It is our hope that this article was helpful in your encounter with OVH dedicated servers.

Similar guides available on our website.

• Install Rocky Linux 8 on Hetzner Root Server
• Deploy VM Instances on Hetzner Cloud with Terraform