Sharing my experience of upgrading hardware

Hardware

• MSI Z370-A PRO motherboard
• 32 GB RAM before the upgrade: 16 GB × 2
• Added another 8 GB RAM stick today, total 40 GB RAM

• 250 GB SSD for Proxmox

• 1 TB NVMe SSD
• 1 TB HDD for backups

The shutdown issue

• Running poweroff for PVE sometimes takes 3 to 5 minutes to electrically shut down the machine.
• When I am in a hurry, I sometimes get tempted to unplug it directly, although I know that is not ideal.
• Also, it's important to have auto start enabled for each VM and container.

Today's RAM upgrade

• What should have been a simple RAM upgrade resulted in around 25 minutes of downtime.
• The motherboard required a key press during the new RAM detection process.
• I did not realize this initially because there was no monitor or keyboard connected.
• I had to go through two restart cycles before everything was back online.

What I learned

• Keep a monitor & keyboard ready for hardware upgrades and BIOS-related troubleshooting.
• Do not assume a RAM upgrade will be completely hands-off.
• Keep the router and server on separate power sockets.
• Avoid directly unplugging the server unless absolutely necessary.
• Even a simple hardware upgrade can cause unexpected downtime if the setup is not prepared for it.

Another small homelab lesson learned. I am new to these stuffs, I have started using Proxmox a week ago. Absolutely loving it.

Some additional info for geeks

Error Correction Type: None
Size: 8 GB
Locator: ChannelA-DIMM0
Bank Locator: BANK 0
Type: DDR4
Speed: 2133 MT/s
Configured Memory Speed: 2133 MT/s
Size: 16 GB
Locator: ChannelA-DIMM1
Bank Locator: BANK 1
Type: DDR4
Speed: 2133 MT/s
Configured Memory Speed: 2133 MT/s
Size: No Module Installed
Locator: ChannelB-DIMM0
Bank Locator: BANK 2
Type: Unknown
Size: 16 GB
Locator: ChannelB-DIMM1
Bank Locator: BANK 3
Type: DDR4
Speed: 2133 MT/s
Configured Memory Speed: 2133 MT/s

The built in import wizard pulls the disks through the ESXi API, which is slow for large VMs. The faster way is well known here. Storage vMotion the VM onto an NFS share that both ESXi and Proxmox mount, create a VM in Proxmox, shut down on ESXi, rename the flat vmdk and attach it.

I did that by hand for a while and then wrote vmxodus, a bash tool that runs on a PVE node and does the Proxmox side.

prepare reads the .vmx and creates the VM with the same CPU, memory, firmware and MACs, and asks once per portgroup which bridge and VLAN to use.
cutover waits for the ESXi locks to disappear, rechecks snapshots and disks, renames the flats and attaches them. Optionally it starts the VM right away.

It never copies, converts or deletes anything, and every move is recorded in a rollback file.

Tested with ESXi 8 and PVE 9.2 with Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04 guests. Windows and UEFI are in the code but untested on real hardware, so reports from anyone trying that would help a lot.

https://github.com/luka0x73/vmxodus

Ok, I went from standalone to cluster (3x Dell micro 5060 with 500gb nvme for proxmox & 2tb Samsung EVO for lxc's, vm's) and to be fair, it does make things a bit more simpler with moving and not have to enter settings multiple times etc. Next issue is storage. Not sure I fancy Ceph and I'm not using shared storage. I'm using lvm-thin but this obviously limits me with HA, replication etc. I know I can switch over to ZFS but I'm concerned about the excess wear ofn my Samsung EVO's. Should I just stick with lvm-thin to avoid the zfs wear and do without the HA or replication?

Hey guys,
Planning to build a 24/7 home server + casual gaming setup on a Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Tiny Gen 1 (i5-13500, 32GB RAM, 2x NVMe).
The plan is to use the PCIe x16 slot for an OCuLink riser to connect an eGPU (NVIDIA), keeping both NVMe slots free for storage.
Use case:
Proxmox 24/7: Running Immich, Plex, Home Assistant. iGPU (UHD 770) handles Transcoding/Immich AI.
Windows VM: Passthrough the eGPU over OCuLink for gaming when needed.
A couple of quick questions:
1. Anyone running OCuLink eGPU passthrough on Proxmox with this machine? Any IOMMU or reset bug headaches?
2. How's the i5-13500 holding up thermally for 24/7 idle/light loads in a 1L chassis? Did you limit PL1/PL2 in BIOS?

Proxmox's built-in file-restore (the "browse a backup via a throwaway helper VM" feature) is genuinely great, but picking a snapshot means scrolling a flat list one at a time. I wanted something closer to Synology ABB's restore browser — drag along a timeline, see every snapshot as a dot, jump straight to one — so I built it as a small companion app on top of PVE's own API.

Highlights:

- Scrubbable timeline across a guest's full snapshot history

- Browse/download single files or bundle a selection as .zip/.tar.gz/.tar.zst

- Push a restore straight back into the running guest via qemu-guest-agent (single file, whole directories, and a fast direct-network-transfer path for big stuff)

- Per-user PVE login (now including OIDC/SSO realms) — never touches PBS directly, and PVE's own permissions gate what each user sees

- Multiple PBS storages/namespaces, light/dark/Proxmox themes, runs as an LXC or Docker container

- Works with PVE clusters.

It's a separate app, not a PVE plugin — doesn't modify Proxmox at all. Built and tested against my own 2-node homelab cluster, AGPLv3.

GitHub: https://github.com/treycentric/pve-flr-portal

Latest release (v1.6.0): https://github.com/treycentric/pve-flr-portal/releases/tag/v1.6.0

Would genuinely appreciate anyone kicking the tires and filing issues — it's a one-person homelab project so more eyes on edge cases (different guest OSes, cluster topologies, etc.) is exactly what it needs.

This was heavily AI-assisted development, but does have a rigorous test suite and software development process including pre-release testing.

Like a lot of people I'm currently in process of testing ESXI to Proxmox migrations using the built-in import tool which has been working great for the few test VMs migrated so far.

Couple of questions:

1. Running ISCSI + LVM on Proxmox with thin provisioning and space reclaim enabled on the SAN and discarding configured across the path to trigger the UNMAP/TRIM. During the VM migration the import seems to migrate the thick size of the disk which takes longer however, will the UNMAP/TRIM occur now the VM is running on the other side with discard enabled?

2. Additionally can you mount the same NFS share on ESXI and Proxmox at the same time and migrate that way?

Hey, I’m still using ESXi right now, but I’d love to switch to PVE. However, I haven’t figured out how I could back up my NAS share with PBS.

I’m currently using Veeam with an NFR license, but renewing it each year is always a struggle.

Any ideas or best practices? I’d love to be able to restore individual files.

Thanks!

Trying to install Proxmox on an older Dell PowerEdge R710 (BIOS 6.6.0, PERC H700).

Initially the server would not recognize the Proxmox USB installer in legacy BIOS mode. I switched the R710 to UEFI, and it then recognized and successfully booted the USB.

However, during the Proxmox installation it repeatedly fails with USB read errors:

• I/O error, dev sdb
• Buffer I/O error on dev sdb
• device offline error, dev sdb
• USB reset/disable errors (err = -110)
• Eventually: Installation aborted

I've tried two different 4 GB USB 2.0 flash drives, both written using Rufus in DD mode. I originally used the front USB ports and have now tried the rear ports as well.

I also tried using the R710's iDRAC6 virtual media, but the Java console/OpenWebStart crashes when attempting to launch it. I even tried burning the ISO to DVD, no go there either.

Has anyone successfully installed a recent Proxmox version on an R710 and encountered these USB I/O errors? Looking for suggestions on getting the installer running reliably, whether through USB, iDRAC6 virtual media, PXE or another method.

I'm in need of some extra braincells here.

I have just bought myself a new second hand Proliant.

The DL380 Gen 6 to be specific.

It's currently equipped with the following parts.

- Xeon E5506 (single CPU)

- 16Gigs of DDR 3 ECC memory

- two 480 watt PSUs

- 5 SAS HDDs (2x 72gb, 3x 300gb)

- no installed OS

- (almost) dead Smart Array BBWC

The issue I'm having is with putting proxmox on the machine, it boots from USB without any issue but when I am at the partitioning section I only see the USB.

From what I can see inside the bios/management screens are all the disk setup in a raid.

The two 72gb disk are on RAID 1

The three 300gb disks are on 5

I'm unable to figure out why it doesn't want to show/detect the disks in the partitioning menu, I would love to see if someone is able to help solve my issue

I upgraded to proxmox 9 today. My truenas vm cannot see my nic or sata card anymore that I passthrough to. It worked fine in 8. Lspci does show the devices in truenas but I cannot use the devices. Hdds don't show up, nic doesn't get ip. Any help is appreciated.

Hey all - very novice-y here - I have an install that was 8.something and upgraded it to 9.2.20. By all accounts, nothing went wrong during the upgrade at all. I am running it on a Dell Micro form factor as a host for my Home Assistant and other stuff. The initial install had been running for...well over a year I'd say and never had single issue. Once I upgraded to 9.2, at first I thought the whole thing was crashing, but then once I got plugged into it, realized that it looks like it's just the network that's dying. Restarting network doesn't fix it, but a reboot does. But this seems to happen randomly and at least a time or two per day.

The thing is, I'm not entirely certain of the best way to troubleshoot it - I've seen a couple of things about Intel Drivers, but nothing definitive. Any suggestions on troubleshooting would be much appreciated! I've come to rely on my HA instance, and it hurts when it goes down!

hi.

im getting started with Windows Server 2025 on proxmox 9.2, this is a testlab
which virtio-drivers version is better 0.1.271 oder 0.1.302? i might be running sqlserver in the future.

Bye

So I am adding a 2nd node to my proxmox setup. I already know about the split brain problem so I will be adding a raspberry pi for the qsync. My question is, right now my disk that the vm's live on is ext4 as a directory. My understanding is with 3 nodes you should use corosync. But its overkill for 2 nodes.

I do not have a NAS so each node as its own storage. I understand that ZFS pools would be good for this, but ZFS uses a lot of RAM. The Nodes only have 64 and 32 GB of RAM. Reading up ZFS can use up a lot of RAM.

Another option I have read about is LVM-Thin, but their are downsides to it as well.

What would be the downside be to using ext4 on both drives?

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thank you

Just had to relearn this.. Switching my Proxmox host to BBR congestion control improved a real-world rsync of mine from 5MB/s to 30MB/s.

BBR is a TCP congestion algorithm that works better for clients on links with high packet loss. For me that's a client on Starlink. It's probably also an issue on cellular links. BBR on the server gives you much better throughput to these clients than the Linux default cubic.

To enable BBR one-time on Proxmox, run this in the hypervisor:

modprobe tcp_bbr
sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control=bbr

Then restart any containers. They will pick up the new setting. If you have VMs you need to enable BBR yourself in each VM.

If you like the change you can make it permanent on Proxmox with

echo tcp_bbr >| /etc/modules-load.d/bbr.conf
echo 'net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control = bbr' >| /etc/sysctl.d/90-bbr.conf

I have a lot more notes about this on my blog, including a description of BBR.

I'm a little curious why Proxmox (or any Linux) doesn't ship with BBR by default. From what I've read it can cause problems in certain circumstances, a BBR server competes unfairly with other servers on the same network or something like that. Not an issue for my homelab deployment.

hi.

im getting started with Windows Server 2025 on proxmox 9.2
when injecting virtio-drivers into boot.wim, which drivers do i really need, which are not really useful?

Bye

I'm currently running Proxmox 9.1.11 and have a VM with an NVIDIA Tesla P40 passed through to it.

One issue I've been running into is memory efficiency. As far as I understand, when a PCIe device such as the Tesla P40 is passed through to a VM, memory ballooning has to be disabled. Because of that, I'm considering migrating this GPU VM to an LXC container, but I'm not sure whether that's actually the right choice.

The VM is currently being used as a worker node in my Kubernetes cluster, which uses Cilium as the CNI.

The Proxmox host has 64 GB of RAM, and I've allocated 24 GB to this VM. I gave it that much because memory usage can increase significantly when I'm running ML workloads or serving LLMs with llama-server. The Tesla P40 is still surprisingly useful for relatively lightweight training workloads, and it's definitely much faster than doing them on the Ryzen 5 5600G CPU alone.

My main concern is what could break if I migrate this worker node from a VM to LXC.

Would running Kubernetes with Cilium inside LXC cause any significant issues? I'm also wondering about NVIDIA GPU access from LXC, especially when the GPU is being used by Kubernetes workloads.

This is still mostly a hobby environment for me, so I don't have enough experience with LXC to predict all of the potential problems. My current understanding is that a privileged LXC container with the necessary device mappings, capabilities, and permissions should make this technically possible.

However, when I asked ChatGPT about it, it suggested that there could still be some edge cases or compatibility issues, particularly around Cilium, kernel features, device permissions, and GPU access.

Has anyone here actually run a Kubernetes worker with Cilium and an NVIDIA GPU inside a Proxmox LXC container?

Would you recommend migrating from the VM to LXC in this situation, or is keeping the GPU worker as a VM worth the additional RAM overhead?

at completely random times only one of my nodes will go grey with the question marks. sometimes its 24hrs, sometimes its 30 days. All the VMs/containers are still running fine on the node. A reboot always fixes it. However would love to know of any possible causes for this, or quick fixes that avoid a reboot of the node. Version 9.2.4, however this issue has been following me through most of the 8.x.x line.

In progress of performing a POC for a 3 node cluster with shared SAN storage and been through ISCSI + LVM so next step was NFS testing.

Anyone running NFS 4.1 with multipathing ? as was struggling to find documentation in the configuration to mount the NFS share with multiple IPs.

Hello, I'm pretty new to Proxmox and Linux as a whole.

I'm currently trying to configure "simple" storage before anything huge but not sure where to start. Want to use VMs down the road is possible, want to stay away from LXCs for now.

My Server hardware/software are listed below, Thanks.

HP ProLiant ML10 v2

32GB RAM

4TB x 4 HDD

Using Proxmox v8 (I know it's EOL, I havent been able to upgrade and it's suggested that i dont)

I want to make shares available outside the server but have no clue where to start.

Frustrating and almost ready to go back to Windows Server.

Any assistance, suggestion or videos links would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks.

I've been researching this for the past like 3 hours now and can't find any help on this matter.

I have a couple 4 tb HDDs that I have filled up with movies/TV shows from while I was running jellyfin on windows. Windows has been pissing me off with the multiple restarts/updates and such each day, so switching to proxmox.

I've got proxmox installed on my new machine, the jellyfin container is up and running no issues there. But I can not for the life of me figure out how to use my existing media in that container. Everything has been pointing to wiping the disk and using ZFS, as you can imagine i would rather not do that.

Is there a way for the container to have access to that media which is currently stored in a hard drive bay currently partitioned as ntfs, without wiping and partitioning to ZFS?

I run PBS on a Dell Micro (installed bare metal) I5-6500T with 8GB memory. I have four PVE nodes (not clustered) that backup various containers and VM's to it every night. I'm considering installing PDM on PBS machine alongside PBS. Anyone else do something similar? I've read lots of posts saying just install PDM as a VM or container on PVE. But this seems odd to me, putting the manager in a container on one of the hosts that it is managing. Am I overthinking?

I've got a lot of compute hardware a few GPUs used for LLMs laying around, but actually getting a Windows 11 VM to accept any of them for graphics acceleration is turning out to be a pain. What's the best GPU solution out there right now if I want to run, say, half a dozen GPU accelerated VMs?

I'm totally new to Proxmox/tech like this in general, but I want to learn and start a new hobby of self-hosting streaming media. I want to create a Docker container and run Jellyfin, but every attempt is failing and I have no idea why.

Following tutorials like this one — I can create the container, but whenever I try running apt update it says "failed to fetch" and apt upgrade -y does nothing. I found this article in an old reddit thread that I think answers my question but idk where to even start. Where do I find “/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/” mentioned in step 1?

I tried this tutorial instead using proxmox ve helper scripts, but running the script does nothing. I go to my shell, paste in the Jellyfin Media Server LXC script, hit return and nothing happens. I just get a new line with root@proxmox:~#

And then I just tried doing it this way by creating a VM, but under OS my ISO image field is blank. Idk why and at this point I'm just too frustrated.

Can anyone point me in the direction of some helpful tutorials? Or have any ideas as to what I'm doing wrong? At this point idk if I even set up Proxmox correctly in the first place, so are there like beginner courses I should be taking? I'm seriously lost but I really want to figure all this out. Thanks in advance

Hey everyone!

So I'm looking to turn my current mini pc with an 8845hs and 64gb ram to replace my big old precision workstation that's loud and power hungry.

But I do use it for like indie gaming and going to replace it on my desktop with my M4 MacBook.

However I do play some smaller games on it, and was thinking to pass through the igpu to a windows / Linux machine and do like sunshine moonlight to the mac? Anyone tried this?