From the course: Complete Guide to Open Source Security

The Proxmox virtualization system

From the course: Complete Guide to Open Source Security

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The Proxmox virtualization system

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- [Instructor] Before we start using Proxmox, let's check out its interface. The top entry in the left hand tree menu is the data center. This is the overall view of the resources that we have allocated to this instance of Proxmox. In our case, we're running on just a single node, so we have just cybex shown as an expansion of the data center. It has a green tick, which means it's online. We could have more nodes running in the data center to increase the available resources that we can use, and these can all be accessed using this console screen. I have a home data center running, which has four nodes clustered into the one data center all active, and at the lower right we can see we have nine VMs running and 28 VMs created, but currently stopped. Okay, let's get back to our course data center. When we expand our cybex node, we can see the compute and storage resources running on that node. Currently, we just have the network and storage devices, but we'll see virtual machines and machine templates appear here as we proceed. Let's go back to the data center. At the top left, we have a dropdown, which provides different views in the left hand panel. We're currently in the server view. This details the virtual machines and the disc storage per node. If we check the dropdown, we can see that it provides three views of our data center, server view where we are, and an additional folder and pool view. We don't have much in the way of resources set up yet, but we'll be working from the server view in this course. However, let's take a quick look at the other two. The folder view shows the resources listed as nodes, software divine networking and storage. Expanding nodes, we see our cybex node. When we expand SDN, we have our default network. Storage shows the same two data stores as we saw in our server view. The pool view lists, the virtual machines that we've set up, but we don't have any as yet. Okay, let's go back to the server view now. The middle panel is the main menu for the resource that we've selected at the left. We're currently on search, and this provides a summary of the data center resources in their usage. If we move down to summary, we get the status screen we saw previously in our home data center, and when we scroll down, we get a dashboard of CPU, memory and storage usage. We can see we're not doing a great deal on the data center at the moment. The notes option allows us to add notes for our own use against the data center as a whole. We won't go through the rest of the entries here, but as you can see, there's quite a lot to learn about Proxmox. Let's select our cybex node now. We now have the node context menu in the middle panel. We can see at the top right that we have options for rebooting the node, shutting it down, getting a command shell to work at the hypervisor level within the node and what are called bulk actions, which we can take against all virtual machines on the node, specifically starting and stopping them. Above these options, we also have a link to the Proxmox documentation held on the node itself. This includes administrative guides and other resources that we might want to use. An important button we'll be using shortly is Create VM which is how we create a virtual machine on the node. Create CT allows us to create Linux containers and then run container-based services rather than full virtual machines. We won't be using containers in this course. The far right dropdown provides access to our account settings. Back in the middle panel, we can select summary. This is the main node screen we use when we're running our virtual machines. It provides a dashboard of the resource usage for the node together with node performance graphs as we scroll down. At the right hand side, we have some hardware details. We can see we're running 31.23, about 32 gigabits of memory, and we have eight CPUs available. If we select discs in the middle panel, we can see the physical discs in the node. Here we see we have two solid state discs, a 512 gigabyte disc called devnvme0n1 and a 256 gigabyte disc called devsda. Okay, that's a short tour of Proxmox, but sufficient for what we need for our course. If you want to learn more about using Proxmox as a home or business data center, check out Scott Simpson's Proxmox course in the LinkedIn Learning Library.

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