10 tips to get the most out of your Proxmox server

[@zlov1378]

The disabling `use tablet for pointer` bit was solid gold. Thank you!

[@chrisdash83]

10 tips in 5 minutes, not a single word was wasted in this video, you're like a machinegun of useful information! Loving the channel, keep doing what you're doing!

[@vaithyvaithiyanathan9535]

One of the best no nonsense & no promotion + no time waste videos which I had watched recently. Thanks a lot !!

[@heckyes]

Totally enjoying this channel. Super glad KZbin recommended it to me.

[@snppls]

Thanks man. Your videos are both incredibly informative and interesting. I've learnt heaps about Proxmox because of you!

[@Oliver-Arnold]

Thanks for these tips! I've not long found your channel and I'm really enjoying your content, well explained and easy to follow. I have quite a few Linux VM's with no GUI for various services and the tip for disabling "Use tablet for pointer" is brilliant. The idle CPU usage of my host has now dropped from 16% to around 5%, just from unticking a box! That's actually quite significant when running 24/7, especially with power being so expensive at the moment.

[@curtalfrey1636]

yeah, more tips, thanks man!

[@KeithDavey2014]

Thanks!

[@10apentecost]

Keep up the good work. I really enjoy watching all your video's

[@10apentecost]

Do you use home assistant on proxmox by any chance?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

No, I don't use use home assistant . I haven't done much with smart home tech..

[@yerunski]

@@10apentecost I do and it works fine :)

[@BeamDeam]

@@10apentecost I also use home assistant on proxmox and don't have any issues.

[@ryan8poker]

Grateful for all ur vids so well explained and to the point!!

[@frankindude]

Thanks for all the great tips. They are very helpful.

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

Glad it was helpful!

[@Tolknaz]

Great tips. In addition to these, one thing i usually do for all guests no matter the OS, is installing Qemu guest agent. Aso, I would add, that for windows guests virtio windows drivers are mandatory, if you use any virtio devices (you should, the performance increase is noticeable). Most Linux distros support them out of the box. Oh and for multi CPU servers, enabling NUMA is also probably a good idea.

[@JohnMayfield-NS]

Good tips in here, thanks :) Maybe it's something people do a lot and I just figured out, but I put the IP of each vm/lxc in the notes section (Summery view) as well as any commands I might use often, but not often enough to remember off the top of my head. For example upgrading a specific program a specific way, or backing up a database for a program that has to be done a specific way.

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

Keeping track of IPs can be a pain for me too. I sometimes use the vmid in the ip, so for exaple 10.1.1.104 would be vm 104. If you have the guest agent installed for a VM it will also fetch the IP of the vm automatically and put it in the summary page for the VM.

[@JohnMayfield-NS]

VM id as IP is a great idea! Wish I'd thought of it before I made all these vms.. 😂

[@kullal007]

@@ElectronicsWizardry What is the VM IP ends in a single digit? Proxmox doesnt allow the VM number below 3 digits.

[@BeamDeam]

@@kullal007 change the IP of the VM and match it to the VM ID

[@dominick253]

​@@kullal007003

[@lukastram4990]

amazing trick with the iso :) thanks man. and nice you zoom in the video for commands and settings

[@mikemorris5944]

I haven't really started using my newly installed ProxMox. Trying to get acquainted with everything first. After watching you vids I'm going to reinstall using the zFS option. I purchased a new laptop with allot ram 65 meg and 2T drive and installed it easily but that was after a week of pulling out what hair I have left trying to get an old HP windows 7 to boot the same USB iso but just hung at Grub line. I'd like to add it to the network. Thanks again great vid you are one of the best on the subject in my opinion detail is king.

[@AlexanderGarzon]

The hibernate before reboot its quite useful. 👍

[@johnkaldachar]

Dobra robota. Dziękuje.

[@durgeshkshirsagar5160]

Really appreciate the tips.

[@briceperdue7587]

The CPU host selection makes so much sense but i've never done it. Cool video

[@ersougelanvol]

This went straight to my Bookmarks. amazing howto. kudos

[@chromerims]

Helpful ProxMox tips 👍 Thank you Brendan!

[@IFlipRizla]

I am yet to install proxmox as I'm just researching into it but found your insights very helpful!

[@TonyGonzales]

Great video; thanks.

[@davincicode1238]

Your my inspiration in Proxmox, I will keep learning on you.

[@GorkemYildirim]

Great info. Thanks for sharing.

[@irawhitejr]

This was super helpful thank you very much and keep it up man!

[@chromerims]

Cool video 1:28 -- ISO file to leverage cd-rom input is something I will try. I am guessing that 'dd' command could do the same thing here as 'mkisofs' command in terms of making that ISO file.

[@pxsx187]

Hello i tried the discard feature for the storage but i doesnt work for me Could my raid controller be the problem? I am on Proxmox Version 8.2

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

What do you mean by it doesn't work? Discard for a VM I think doesn't work in IDE drives, so check for that. How are you trying to run the trim command in the vm? I'd typically use fstrim on linux and optimize-volume -retrim in powershell in windows.

[@succubiuseisspin3707]

With my PVE I have limited the ARC cache to a reasonable amount so that ZFS won't eat up all my RAM. (see PVE docs) And I have configured my SMTP server in the postfix conf so that PVE can send me an email if there is a problem with a disk in my ZFS pool...

[@GeoffSeeley]

Modify the rrdcached configuration and start script to increase the WRITE_TIMEOUT and add FLUSH_TIMEOUT so it writes less to your boot volume to prevent wear of SSD/NVme.

[@rommel8779]

Awesome video 👍👍

[@HaitiSpaceAgency]

I found a nice tip just the other day. By default my Proxmox host was running my cpu at full blast (3.4ghz ryzen 2600) and if you do not want that, it was very simple to change. echo "powersave" | tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor Has it running at 1.5ghz (iirc) now which is more than good enough for my purposes. I’ve only read into it a little bit but I think there are options for the cpu to boost up/down dynamically as they are designed to. If anyone can point me in the right direction there I would appreciate it :)

[@juanmondragon]

I think that is the default now for dynamic CPU usage. I checked throughout the day and sometimes it's at peak CPU usage and other times it's at idle

[@bjorndanziger8036]

"ondemand" would increase the clockspeed if required. "powersave" keeps it at minimum.

[@suntoryjim]

Great tips. Which virtual disk format do you recommend: Qemu image or Raw disk?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

The qemu image or qcow2 supports snapshots while raw is faster. I think it’s nice to have snapshots and the performance hit is fairly small normally so I use qcow2 normally.

[@petergplus6667]

Give that man a decent microphone. Thanks for the tips.

[@billhickswasgreat3421]

Does the second one, turning Proxmox into a switch, mean that I could sum up the bandwidth by adding NICs to the Proxmox machine i.e. adding 2 cheP 2.5gbe cards and having 5gbits instead of going for the much more expensive 10gbits?

[@agglad2230]

Thank you for this video! Very interesting! I'd like to request video tutorial on Proxmox with CA SSL, how to make it work with a purchased SSL.

[@ChargedPulsar]

Like the old hdd in the background 😂, them old clicky days.

[@Cmdrlucky8]

Awesome tips! 👍🏽

[@neail5466]

You are really a source of dependable information, some of us are not advanced users but need to do something that sometimes require advance knowledge. If I search a topic and find one of your videos, thats really a relief. Thanks for the work and efforts you are putting in. Could you please help about the 2 cases below? First, I just installed a second VM under vertIO 0 block which was already in use by a previous VM. Since the previous VM failed to start, and I had to reinstall it. I just want to be sure if the virtIO blocks 0,1... act as individual system harddrive and multiple VMs can't be installed in one block?? Second, Could you please also tell me what is the way to pass through hdds without any emulation, I am using a QM SCSI pass through with script to OMV VM, but I don't have access to the smart data inside OMV. Thanks in advance.

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

By block do you man the virto0 and virtio1 names that are used for drives on a vm? Those are specific to a vm and multiple systems can use a virtio0 device. Multiple VMs should share one storage on disk as they will overwrite each others data and cause issues. For the hdd passthrough there isn’t a full passthrough option I know of. I’d rather monitor smart data in proxmox or let proxmox handle the raid and present a virtual disk to the vm. Otherwise you can pass through the disk controller via pcie passthrough but this requires a compatible hardware configuration.

[@neail5466]

@@ElectronicsWizardry Hi, thanks for the reply. About the virtIO blocks I have learnt that the hard way, in you writing I believe you wanted to say that those can be read from multiple devices and written by one one... Yes I didn't had a idea and neither proxmox warned about that. I thought there would be further segmentation depending on OS installs.. which is wrong. And about pass through I am using my disks by the PCIe RAID controller in IT/JBOD mode..and after many hours of research understood there is probably no way to directly mount the raw drive to the VM, whatever I do it would be an emulated instance. Thanks for having time to responding to my query.

[@Tofflus]

@ElectronicsWizardry can you please make a video showing how to turn off stuff that does read and writes to the boot drive. my SSD was new in October and end December it has 25% wearout. the SSDs in mirror have only 40TBW. thanks for all the videos!

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

Sure. I’ll take a look at what I can do to lower the amount of writes on the boot drive.

[@joejoe2452]

How do you determine the type of hardware spec for running vms? What would be the best spec for running proxmox with more than 10 vms

[@user-ty3iy8bk2l]

Awesome! Thanks!

[@TazzSmk]

I'm still trying to figure out best setting for a single SSD ZFS pool with VMs, no matter what I try, in a VM I still get major slowdowns after roughly 3GB data to be written, resulting in severe IO wait spike on the host cpu, any ideas what's wrong?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

I'd take a look at a program like iostat to see usage on the ssds. Many ssds have a write cache and I wouldn't be surprised if you have filled that write cache and speeds will slow significantly when that happens.

[@TazzSmk]

@@ElectronicsWizardry it's 500GB 860 EVO which should have 22GB cache, and once it fills it should drop to around 380MB/s, but I'm getting literally 1/10 of those at best..

[@opsecactual6269]

Nice tips ❤

[@doozie5696]

Love it

[@LubomirGeorgiev]

Thank you! I was wondering why HDD performance was crap

[@cwzialor]

please explain audio pass through and ways to vnc or remote proxmox vms

[@mishasawangwan6652]

are you taking requests? how about a tutorial on ceph or object stores in general? great channel!

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll start researching and testing ceph.

[@MHM4V3R1CK]

@@ElectronicsWizardry I'd love this too. No idea what ceph is but it keeps showing up in documentation 🙂

[@m.m.m.c.a.k.e]

Awesome

[@kullal007]

Love your videos. Can you expand a bit and demo every tip ?

[@virtualizeeverything]

Grate Video

[@merlingt1]

Wow nice video!

[@cezaryjuszczyk7269]

Hello, I've a problem with performance in proxmox 8.1. I Have 1vm with win2002 srv as rdp and 1vm with mssql 2019. When i run app on rdp to connect sql the speed is terrible, about 7 second for open new window with simple select, and another 7 second for preview one document with 1 row in database. On server (hetzner) i've enterprise disks ssd with zfs raid1. Any idea how to speed up ?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

I haven't seen this bad of a VM latency issue when using the UI. Do you mean Server 2012? I'd probably check task manager and Proxmox server utilization first to see if anything is over utilized.

[@mentalplayground]

Thank You for chapters.

[@davidtjac]

Hi just looking for a simple how to resize a VM. I get the easy bit within the GUI but understand there's other command line stuff to do after. Thanks.

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

In proxmox resizing the disk for a vm is as easy as adding space in the gui. You need to then configure the vm to use more space. In windows you can use disk management to expand a partition. You can do the same in most Linux distros. You can also use tools like disks to increase the partition size and then expand the partition using the filesystem tools.

[@riffdex]

What’s the benefit of having a proxmox cluster in a home network?

[@kingneutron1]

I was a big vmware workstation user for years, then switched to Virtualbox when they fired the entire desktop devel team. Virtualbox /cannot/ do 10gbit networking speeds in VMs, period. Proxmox can - tested with iperf3 :). I thought I didn't have a use-case for it at first, but it's very powerful. And being based on Debian, I can still use my usual root sysadmin scripts. I bridged 3/4 of my Qotom "firewall appliance" 10-Gbit SFP+ ports together on Proxmox easily with MTU 9000, and briefly had the 4th port separate on MTU 1500 (I got rid of that 10gbit adapter for not supporting 9000 tho.) I have it running 3x VMs to provide DHCP addresses for 2.5Gbit LAN, 10-Gbit LAN and a Host-Only network (pfsense, opnsense and ipfire. Makes it easy to test different distros. IPFire runs in less than 512MB RAM! for my limited needs.) Plus several Win10 VMs, one of which was fresh-installed from ISO and is now running BOINC. Also have a couple of livecd / internet-boot VMs and am learning about LXC containers (and newly-discovered bind mounts.) Also tested P2V Win10 restore with Veeam over Samba using 2.5 and 10-gbit network. Worked fine. Lots of cool things to learn, MIGHT go with a separate 2-node cluster and see about live migration between hosts...

[@zadekeys2194]

Learning? Or free tools? Fun? All the above ? Part of what I run is Zabbix, Pi alert and Uptime Kuma, this allows me to monitor my home, CCTV, IoT vLan, and public infrastructure like DNS servers so I can see when a certain DNS server is under performing.

[@UrgentSnooker]

It's not about benefits but about achieving a required goal

[@homehome4822]

Have you tried zfs draid?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

Nope I haven’t tried it yet. I plan on trying it soon and making a video about it.

[@JAVIERLLAMAS10]

Does the command "atime" only applies for ZFS pools? is the ext4 pool less stressed or is this "atime=off" command even necessary??

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

I haven't tested setting atime off in ext4, but I believe the performance hit is small for ext4, so its likely to help less turing it off. To configure atime for ext4 add noatime to the mount options in fstab.

[@KcinicKGX]

@@ElectronicsWizardry also it's good to put a noatime to nfs mounts

[@Tntdruid]

Any way to limit the ram zfs use?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

To limit the size of the ZFS arc you can edit /etc/modprobe.d/zfs.conf and add a options zfs zfs_arc_max=$MaxInBytes Here is the Proxmox guide for more info pve.proxmox.com/wiki/ZFS_on_Linux

[@Jay2k1]

It might be annoying to not see how much RAM you have available for VMs when checking the "Datacenter" summary tab, but letting ZFS use a lot of RAM for the ARC cache is beneficial for performance, so I would not decrease the amount of memory it can use.

[@kingneutron1]

@@Jay2k1 On a 16GB-or-less host, you pretty much have to decrease ZFS RAM use if you plan to run a number of VMs. 1-2GB limit is usually enough for homelab. You can make it up somewhat with an L2ARC cache device; even a partitioned usb3 thumbdrive to share between (small) pools can help there. They have the advantage of being inexpensive - if one dies you can just replace it -- and L2ARC survives a reboot these days. Informal testing ' ls -lR /zpoolname >/dev/null ' and ' find /zpoolname >/dev/null ' with a cheap thumbdrive L2ARC partitioned and shared between 2x single-disk pools resulted in subsequent runs taking much less time than the 1st. Host still had plenty of RAM for VMs

[@fstoplive1991]

Excellent tips, Thank you I'm new to virtualization & your videos are really helpful. Do you use Proxmox to just try out different linux OSs? I'm unable to get sound in vm guests. Is the forum for proxmox a paid only access community?

[@2u263]

Could you please, do a detailed video for Stand Alone PC PVE with an ICEwm so you don't need to have 2 devices to access PVE? Just add ICEwm to the PC PVE 7.1 video you did?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

Yea I think that’s an interesting video. I’ll plan on making that in the future

[@2u263]

@@ElectronicsWizardry Update I managed to install the Debian Xfce chromium light WM & it was working well till I started customizing the WM trying to make xterm functional and I installed sudo then did an update from the WM. Borked the whole damn thing. I don't know why on earth Debian 12 xfce chromium light build with xterm? Will reinstall again. This time I'm not messing with WM. Instead I'll build a Debian12 VM

[@prudhvireddy8765]

for file transfers between the vm and my other machine, I have created a debian container and configured sftp in it. In my other machine I added a route to the container. This way, I can easily transfer files in and out of VM's. Hope this helps someone !!!

[@jwo7777777]

Yes, but does it cut hair?

[@flarelu3157]

it's mean and rude, dude

[@saltierthanyou69]

scp instead of ISO is better for copying

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

Can scp be used for a vm without network? I’d normally use scp or a network share to move files to and from a vm but iso files can be nice if the vm isn’t on a network with a local server or if the iso is for stuff like drivers for use before the network is setup.

[@saltierthanyou69]

@@ElectronicsWizardry that's true, :) didn't think of it

[@TheNorthRemember]

try learning english pronunciation

[@yoyo26-34]

Dear, I went through several of your videos;. Topics are very interesting, most of the time you are tthe only one to mention them, but I have to say that for non english natives, you are very very hard to understand :-{

[@ImbaCore]

I'm not native and understand everything. Maby sometimes it is litle bit to fast but You can always slow down the video or turn on subtitles. I realy like non standard approach to proxmox and other stuff