Installing Proxmox was something that I had wanted to try for some time. I was looking for a better way to expand to my home lab making it more useful. The main thing about home labs is establishing servers that provide one purpose... that purpose is to provide services within an internal network! So what I did was install Proxmox. 

You may be wondering what exactly is Proxmox? What is it's use? Why have I been wanting to try it for some time? Well, let me begin with explaining what Proxmox is. Proxmox, is a server that allows someone to run multiple various virtual machines. Virtual machines are basically a computer that is running within a computer except its sharing the hardware of the host computer (The physical computer). So within those virtual machines, you can run various operating systems such as different versions of Windows, different distributions of Linux or run other servers! 

 Now, my challenges that I faced installing the server to my host computer was that my host computer had trouble finding the USB drive that had the operating system ISO file installed. I committed to various attempts ejecting the USB drive and plugging it back in, restarting the system and going into bios which is a built in software a computer uses before a operating system starts. Later to realize that for some reason, the USB boot option was set to disabled. I fixed that issue, then proceeded to go through the setup. Now with Proxmox, you need to set a static IP address for the server. An IP (Internet Protocol) address is basically an network address specifically set to devices that are connected to the network. The thing is, if you don't set a static IP address, the address could eventually change into something else because by default it's dynamic which would make it a bit difficult to figure out the address of the server. 
 

Although the installation wasn't going the way I wanted it at the beginning, it taught me about virtualization and server configurations. Going forward, I plan on using my Proxmox server to expand my home lab by installing different operating systems. I'm excited to learn more about the server and see what the server is capable of!