I have more than few laptops laying around that are too old to run anything but Linux… But I don’t want to part from them. Because I think they are still poweful enough to do things but also because there is no real good way to recycle them. And I always wished to find better use of them then using as level-2 hypervisor server. And to me that is just waste of precious resource as you run hypervisor on top of OS that is already using 1/2 of available system resources. And unfortunately, most of freely avaiable level-1 hypervisors like Microsoft Hyper-V or Vmware ESXi are not installable on consumer grade hardware (i.e. Laptops) because they have very specific requirements for hardware (specifically NICs are always causing issue, unless there is open source driver available for it). So my forever common setup was use VMBox in Linux…. which I hated by heart because it is very inconvinient.

Enter the Proxmox…. Untill very recently I never thought that world has to offer more than few big names as hypervisor. Actually I found it accidently at some random corner of internet. The best thing about it is, it is based on Debian and so you can pretty much install it on any machine where you can install Debian (meaning all of my laptops can run it !!). With that being said I will just dive in setup process.

The way it works is, you can download Proxmox from their website. It is open source so it’s code can be reviewed and audited by anyone. Now I am not a licensing expert or lawyer so don’t quote me but as far as I can understand it is free to use even in enterprise environment. And if you need help with software they do have decent subscription support.

Once you download ISO, you can burn it as CD (seriously who is even using them now a days?) or to USB. Once that is done plug it to your laptop and boot via USB or CD\DVD.

When it boots it will come up this installation screen.

Boot

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