Course Overview
Proxmox VE has become the leading open-source alternative to VMware vSphere - and for many organisations the platform of choice for the post-Broadcom era. This five-day, instructor-led course gives system administrators everything they need to design, build, operate and automate a production-grade Proxmox VE 9.x infrastructure: from a fresh single host to a three-node cluster with Ceph, high availability, live migration, Proxmox Backup Server and API-driven provisioning.
Days 1 and 2 build the foundation on a single host: architecture, installation and updates, GUI and CLI, users and permissions, host networking, local storage, Linux and Windows VMs, templates and containers. Days 3 to 5 turn three hosts into a cluster and add shared storage (NFS, iSCSI/shared LVM, Ceph), HA and migration, the import of real VMware VMs, backup and restore with Proxmox Backup Server, and automation with cloud-init, Ansible and Terraform/OpenTofu. The Proxmox Datacenter Manager closes the week with the multi-cluster view.
Every participant works in a private, fully isolated lab pod for the whole week - including a nested ESXi host as the source for the VMware migration lab. Instructor-led break & fix scenarios train what slides cannot: diagnosing a broken cluster, a degraded Ceph pool or a VM that will not boot after import.
What makes this course different
- Your own pod - all week - Three nested Proxmox VE 9 nodes, a services VM (DNS, LDAP, NFS, iSCSI, Proxmox Backup Server, internal ACME CA, InfluxDB, mail sink), a router, a Linux desktop and a nested ESXi 8 host - isolated from every other participant. Whatever you break, you fix. The pod runs identically on ESXi or Proxmox VE underneath.
- Real VMware migration, not a slide - You import a Linux and a Windows VM from a real ESXi host in your pod with the built-in importer and do the reconfiguration that real projects need: VirtIO drivers, firmware, boot order, network.
- Written for VMware administrators - Every concept is mapped to what you already know: vCenter and Datacenter Manager, DRS and the Cluster Resource Scheduler, HA groups and affinity rules, NSX and SDN/VXLAN, VMFS/vSAN and shared LVM/Ceph - including an honest word on what has no equivalent.
- Break & fix built in - Seven instructor-led failure scenarios - repository drift, VLAN misconfiguration, quorum loss, OSD failure, wrong firmware after import and more. Participants diagnose and repair; the trainer coaches.
- Current Proxmox VE 9 - Not a warmed-over PVE 7 course: HA affinity rules, the Cluster Resource Scheduler, snapshots on shared LVM, OCI containers, ACME with a custom CA, SDN, Proxmox Datacenter Manager, Proxmox Backup Server 4.2.
- Materials that stay useful - Student Lab Guide with all 26 labs (web and PDF, English and German), the module slides, and follow-up Q&A decks that answer the questions participants actually asked.
Who should attend
- System and virtualization administrators running VMware vSphere, Hyper-V or KVM/oVirt today who want to adopt Proxmox VE.
- Linux administrators responsible for compute, networking and storage in private or hybrid data centers.
- DevOps and platform engineers automating VM provisioning.
- Solution architects designing hyper-converged or shared-storage clusters.
Prerequisites
- Working knowledge of the 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, manage repositories and updates.
- Operate Proxmox VE through the web GUI and the CLI (qm, pct, pvesm, pvecm, pvesh) and read its configuration under /etc/pve.
- Design host networking with Linux bridges, bonds and VLANs; use SDN for cluster-wide virtual networks; integrate the Proxmox firewall.
- Configure local storage - directory, LVM-thin and ZFS - and position ZFS replication.
- Create, customise, clone and template Linux and Windows VMs with VirtIO and the QEMU guest agent; run LXC containers, including from OCI images.
- Manage users, groups and permissions with PAM, PVE and LDAP realms; secure node access with ACME certificates.
- Attach shared storage: NFS, iSCSI with shared LVM and multipath, and Ceph RBD.
- Build a Proxmox cluster with Corosync, manage quorum and enable HA with fencing, affinity rules and the Cluster Resource Scheduler.
- Perform live, offline and storage migrations between nodes.
- Import VMware/vSphere VMs and reconfigure them for Proxmox VE.
- Deploy Proxmox Backup Server and design backup, retention and restore strategies.
- Automate VM provisioning with cloud-init templates, Ansible and Terraform/OpenTofu; know where the Proxmox Datacenter Manager fits.
Course Content
- Introduction
- Virtualization concepts and Proxmox VE architecture (KVM/QEMU/LXC, daemons, vSphere and Hyper-V compared)
- Installation, repositories and host baseline (deb822 sources, updates, time, mail notifications)
- Web GUI, users and permissions (PAM, PVE realm, LDAP realm, groups and roles)
- CLI essentials, configuration files and host networking (pmxcfs, pvesh, bridges, VLANs, ifupdown2)
- The Proxmox VE storage model and local storage (directory, LVM-thin, ZFS, replication with pvesr)
- Virtual machine anatomy: QEMU/KVM, machine type, firmware, VirtIO, guest agent
- Windows guests done right (VirtIO driver injection, what a production-ready Windows VM needs)
- Templates, clones and cloud-init (full vs linked clones, identity at first boot)
- Monitoring and performance baselines (RRD vs external metric server)
- Clustering, Corosync and quorum (what a cluster shares, ring0/ring1, why three nodes)
- Shared storage concepts and NFS (what the 'shared' flag really means)
- iSCSI and shared LVM - the classic SAN pattern (multipath, FC/FCoE mapping, snapshots on shared LVM in PVE 9)
- Ceph - hyper-converged storage (MON/MGR/OSD, replication, self-healing, dedicated networks)
- Node certificates and ACME (Let's Encrypt workflow with an internal CA)
- Live migration and the migration network (what gets copied, secure vs insecure, with/without shared storage)
- High availability, fencing and the Cluster Resource Scheduler (CRM/LRM, watchdog self-fencing, affinity rules, CRS = the PVE answer to DRS)
- Importing VMs from VMware vSphere (built-in ESXi import, Linux vs Windows cleanup)
- SDN - cluster-wide virtual networks (zone/VNet/subnet, VXLAN, EVPN outlook, NSX concept mapping)
- The Proxmox VE firewall (three levels, security groups, the lockout pitfalls)
- Backup: vzdump and the Proxmox Backup Server (modes, jobs, dedup, retention, GC/verify, sync, ransomware protection)
- Cloud-init: VMs that configure themselves
- The API, tokens and Ansible (permission scoping, proxmoxer, playbooks)
- Terraform/OpenTofu - the declarative twin (state, plan/apply, when to combine with Ansible)
- Proxmox Datacenter Manager and where to go next (multi-cluster management, the vCenter question)
English
German
Germany