Proxmox Backup Server Installation Guide

Proxmox Backup Server Requirements

Before you get started, make sure you have these requirements for a production machine:

• CPU: modern 64-bit AMD- or Intel-based, with at least 4 cores.
• RAM: Minimum 4 GiB for the operating system, filesystem cache, and Proxmox Backup Server daemons. Add at least one more GiB for each TiB of storage space.
• Operating System Storage:
  • 32 GiB, or more, of free storage space.
  • Use a hardware RAID with battery-protected write cache (BBU) or a redundant ZFS configuration (ZFS is not compatible with a hardware RAID controller).
• Storage for backups:
  • Prefer fast storage that offers high IOPS for random IO workloads; use only enterprise SSDs for best results.
  • If using HDDs: it is highly recommended to use a metadata cache, e.g. add a ZFS "special device mirror".
• Network cards: use redundant network cards with Multi-GBit/s interfaces.

Necessary for this guide

For the installation described in this guide you will need:

1. Internet access to download the Proxmox Backup Server ISO image
2. A USB flash drive of at least 4GB to create a bootable drive
3. Basic system administration knowledge

Downloading the ISO image

First, download the Proxmox Backup Server ISO image from the Official website of Proxmox.

Installing Proxmox Backup Server

Creating a bootable USB drive

Depending on the operating system you are using, a different procedure is required to create the PBS boot USB, let's see how to do it

a. Instructions for Windows

Use a tool such as Rufus to create a bootable USB drive with the Proxmox Backup Server ISO image.

b. Instructions for Linux

We can write with cp directly the image to the bootable USB device with these commands

1. Identify the device we just inserted in this case /dev/sdd

   sudo dmesg | tail

   [ 6141.877937] sdd: sdd1

2. We enter the directory where we downloaded PBS

   cd $HOME/Downloaded

3. We copy the file to the device we identified earlier

   sudo cp ./proxmox-backup-server*.iso of=/dev/DEVICE_CHOICE

4. We synchronize the filesystems

   sudo sync

c. Instructions for macOS

1. Open Terminal (search for "Terminal" in Spotlight).

2. Convert the .iso file to .dmg format using the convert option of hdiutil. For example:

   hdiutil convert proxmox-backup-server_*.iso -format UDRW -o proxmox-backup-server_*.dmg

   Note: macOS tends to automatically add .dmg to the output file name.

3. To get the current list of devices, run the command:

   diskutil list

Insert the USB stick and re-run the command to determine which device node it has been assigned to (e.g., /dev/diskX).

diskutil list

4. Unmount the USB disk with the command:

   diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX

   Note: replace X with the disk number obtained from the previous command.

5. Write the .dmg image to the USB stick using:

   sudo dd if=proxmox-backup-server_*.dmg bs=1M of=/dev/rdiskX

   Note: in the last command, use rdiskX instead of diskX to increase write speed.

Starting from USB device

• Insert the USB stick into the physical server or virtual machine and start the system from the USB device.

Installing the operating system

Follow the on-screen instructions to install Proxmox Backup Server on your hardware, starting with the graphical installation.

Creates the password for the default user root, the system administrator

Select primary disk and RAID, if any

Configure static IP address

Review summary of configurations

Completed the installation, we are presented with the console with login and web interface address

With this last step we have succeeded in the Installation of Proxmox Backup Server