Course Overview
This 5-day instructor-led course gives system administrators the skills to design, deploy, operate, and automate a production-grade Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) 9.x infrastructure. Days 1-2 cover fundamentals on a single host (installation, GUI/CLI, networking, local storage, VM creation for Linux and Windows). Days 3-5 cover advanced topics: shared storage (NFS, iSCSI, Ceph), cluster, high availability, live migration, importing VMware/vSphere VMs, backup with Proxmox Backup Server, and automation with cloud-init, Ansible, and Terraform.
Who should attend
- System and virtualization administrators currently using VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, or KVM/oVirt who want to adopt Proxmox VE.
- Linux administrators responsible for compute, networking, and storage in private or hybrid datacenters.
- DevOps and platform engineers automating VM provisioning.
- Solution architects designing hyper-converged or shared-storage clusters.
Prerequisites
- Working knowledge of Linux command line (file system, package management, systemd, vi/nano).
- TCP/IP fundamentals: IP addressing, VLANs, routing, DNS.
- Storage concepts: block vs. file vs. object, RAID, LVM.
- General virtualization concepts (hypervisor, VM, snapshot, template).
- Familiarity with at least one hypervisor is helpful but not required.
Course Objectives
Upon successful completion of this course, participants will be able to:
- Install and configure a Proxmox VE 9.x host from scratch.
- Operate Proxmox VE through both the web GUI and the CLI (qm, pct, pvesm, pvecm, pvesh).
- Design host networking with Linux bridges, bonds, and VLANs; integrate with the Proxmox firewall.
- Configure local storage: directory, LVM-thin, and ZFS pools.
- Create, customize, clone, and template Linux and Windows VMs using VirtIO and QEMU Guest Agent.
- Attach shared storage: NFS, iSCSI (with LVM), and Ceph RBD/CephFS.
- Build a Proxmox cluster with Corosync, manage quorum, and enable HA with fencing.
- Perform live, offline, and storage migration between nodes.
- Import VMware/vSphere VMs and reconfigure them for Proxmox VE.
- Deploy Proxmox Backup Server 4.2 and design backup, retention, and restore strategies.
- Automate VM provisioning with cloud-init templates, Ansible, and Terraform.
Course Content
Days 1–2 – Fundamentals:
- Proxmox VE overview, architecture, and installation of a single node
- Management via GUI and CLI, updates, and repositories
- Network configuration: bridges, VLANs, bonding (side note in the advanced section: SDN/VXLAN, optional SDN fabrics)
- Local storage configuration: LVM, LVM-thin, ZFS, directory storage
- Authentication, user and permissions management
- Creating Linux and Windows VMs, including VirtIO, Guest Agent, and basic customization
- LXC containers: Creation and management, including containers from OCI images
- Proxmox VE firewall: Data center, node, and VM levels
- Certificate management: ACME/Let's Encrypt and custom CA
Days 3–5 – Advanced:
- Shared Storage: NFS, iSCSI/Shared LVM (including volume chain snapshotting), Ceph (hyperconverged), storage replication with pvesr/ZFS
- Proxmox VE Cluster: Setup, Quorum, Corosync Redundancy, Management (Side Note: Tag-Based Bulk Actions)
- High Availability: HA Manager, Cluster Resource Scheduling, HA Rules and Resource Affinity, Failover Tests
- Live and Storage Migration
- Migration from VMware vSphere: Import, Driver and Network Reconfiguration (Windows & Linux)
- Backup & Restore with vzdump and Proxmox Backup Server
- Automation: Templates, Cloud-Init, Ansible
- Monitoring & Performance-Baselines
- Troubleshooting an realen Fehlerszenarien
English