Chapter 1. Proxmox VE Fundamentals

Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) is a mature, complete, well-supported, enterprise-class virtualization environment for servers. It is an open source tool—based in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution—that manages containers, virtual machines, storage, virtualized networks, and high-availability clustering through a well-designed, web-based interface or via the command-line interface.

Note

Developers provided the first stable release of Proxmox VE in 2008; four years and eight point releases later, ZDNet's Ken Hess boldly, but quite sensibly, declared Proxmox VE as Proxmox: The Ultimate Hypervisor (http://www.zdnet.com/article/proxmox-the-ultimate-hypervisor/).Four years later, PVE is on version 4.1, in use by at least 90,000 hosts, and more than 500 commercial customers in 140 countries; the web-based administrative interface itself is translated into 19 languages.

This chapter explores the fundamental technologies underlying PVE's hypervisor features: LXC, KVM, and QEMU. To do so, we will develop a working understanding of virtual machines, containers, and their appropriate use.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Proxmox VE in brief
• Virtualization and containerization with PVE
• Proxmox VE virtual machines, KVM, and QEMU
• Containerization with PVE and LXC