Edy’s Tech Blog — Clear, Tested Guides

If you’re planning to virtualize your small business with Proxmox VE, the first big question is simple: what kind of server do you actually need to buy?

Yes, Proxmox runs on a wide range of hardware, from old desktops to high-end rack servers. But for production workloads, “it boots” is not the same as “this will be fast, reliable, and safe to run my business on.”

Installing Ubuntu as a virtual machine on Proxmox VE provides a powerful combination of enterprise-grade virtualization with one of the most popular Linux distributions. This guide covers the complete process of creating Ubuntu VMs within the Proxmox virtual environment, from initial preparation through post-installation optimization.

If you’ve just migrated from VMware to Proxmox, you might be wondering what to install instead of VMware Tools. In VMware ESXi, this package is essential because it includes both drivers and a guest agent that improve performance and integration. While you cannot directly install VMware Tools in Proxmox, you can achieve similar functionality by installing VirtIO drivers and the QEMU Guest Agent, which together provide the features you get when you install VMware Tools on a VMware guest OS.

A Proxmox snapshot is a point-in-time capture of a virtual machine or container’s complete state, including data, configuration files, and optionally memory (RAM). This powerful feature allows system administrators to create instant restore points before making changes, ensuring they can quickly revert to a known good state if something goes wrong.

Proxmox released version 9 in early August 2025, and it’s the best release yet for home server enthusiasts. In this article, I’ll guide you through the installation process using a Dell PowerEdge server — though the same steps work for most hardware.

Docker is a lightweight containerization platform that lets you run isolated applications without the overhead of virtual machines. It’s widely used in DevOps, homelabs, and testing environments.