How to install Pimox / Proxmox on a Raspberry Pi

What is Proxmox and Why Use Virtual Machines with your Pi

Playing with Virtual Machines on a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 with 8gig ram (4gb worksish) has been a source of fun and utility for me. Proxmox and it’s unofficial port to arm64, Pimox, are hypervisors that allow you create Virtual Machines. A virtual machine is a computer that has been abstracted away from the hardware.

With VMs you can run multiple computers on one raspberry pi. Not many, and not very powerful, i.e a headless server running docker with pihole, unbound and nginx with with a couple servers, each running wordpress. VM can be backed up and templated so when you blow them up or want to spin up a new computer you don’t have to go through the imaging process. I’ll go into more detail on what you can do with VMs in another article.

How to Install Proxmox for the Raspberry Pi (Pimox)

For installing Pimox, there are a few good guides out there shared below. After loading and reloading Pimox 6 or 7 times, these are the tutorials I’ve settled on and prefer.

I’ve used all these for installs, or at least pieced together my own installation process from:

Pi My Life Up’s installation script includes loading postfix so you have email capabilities, if you know how to set it up and have an SMTP server.

Things to Do That Are Not Listed in the Guides

One of the first things I do after installing Pimox is setting up a ethernet bridge. Any time you are installing Proxmox on top of another operating system, instead of a bare metal / .iso install, a network bridge won’t be set up. Without the bridge, VMs will fail when you start them up and wouldn’t be able to ge to the network, even if the VMs did boot up. The problem isn’t your VM, it’s the lack of a network bridge.

In addition to building the bridge it has to be set up right, or it will kill your network connection. SSH and the web browser interface will stop working completely. In that situation you’ll have to resort to monitor and keyboard to get into your Pi and manually fix the network configuration.

To add your bridge:

How to create a VM Bridge

When adding a bridge doesn’t work:

Can’t Start VMs

Things to remember when setting up a bridge –

First box is server-ip-address/24 i.e. 192.168.3.3/24
Second is the gateway
Unless you use ip 6, the ip 6 boxes can be blanks.
DNS can be blank.
You have to set the port to be the name of your existing. If not, you will loose the network. The port is on the network connection already from Node –> System –>Network. Mine has always been eth0 but YMMV.
Be careful setting up the vlan option. It hasn’t worked for me.

The next thing I do is make a sudo user to get away from using root for everything. To setup a new user, use useradd, not adduser. (useradd vs. adduser) adduser will create an error. Add your user to sudo, create their home directory, etc. I also load ssh keys I created specifically for logging into my home lab computers so I don’t have type a password to log in. However, keep the ability to log in with a password so you can ssh in with root when you need to.

Once installed, go through these three setup videos. They all walk through setting up storage and a couple housekeeping items that help. They are for Proxmox but they translate to Pimox well.

Before I do anything on Proxmox, I do this first…