Proxmox

The installation process for Proxmox is very straightforward. Burn the ISO to a USB thumbdrive, boot to it, and then complete the installation guide.

I set the IP address to 192.168.0.254 and the host name to pve. I also created a DHCP address reservation in pfSense using the MAC address of the NIC connected to the local network.

There are 2 network ports in use: one is connected to the local network and the other directly to my ISPs ONT.

Backups

I created a share on my Synology NAS to store backups called pve-backups and enabled NFS on it.

PVE Backups NFS Share

Then in the proxmox web gui, under Datacenter > Storage, added the NFS share.

PVE Backups Storage

Then under Datacenter > Backup created a job to backup all of my VMs at 3am every day, retaining the last 60 backups.

PVE Backup Job

PVE Backup Job Retention

60 days of backups should be more than enough for a home environment.

Notifications

Under Datacenter > Notifications, I configured proxmox to send emails to my gmail account. I had to log into gmail and create an app password specifically for proxmox.

First, I disabled the built in notification target and notification matchers. Then I created a new SMTP notification target:

PVE Notification Target

I then created a new notification matcher:

PVE Notification Matcher General

PVE Notification Matcher Match Rules

PVE Notification Matcher Targets to notify

Network

I then had to configure the network devices for the host.

PVE Network Config

During setup I was able to name one NIC as internet and one as lan. They each needed a linux bridge. When performing the setup, I had only connected the lan NIC and it automatically created the vmbr0 linux bridge, so I simply had to create a linux bridge for the internet NIC. It only needs to point to the internet NIC, and that's it.

Updates

Since I do not have a proxmox subscription at home, I needed to configure the update repositories to use the free repos and not the enterprise repos. The settings for the repos can be found by going to Datacenter > pve (or whatever the node's name is) > Updates > Repositories. Selecting the enterprise repos and clicking disable will of course, disable them. Then clicking the Add button, selecting the No-Subscription option, and clicking add. Then repeat for all No-Subscription options get you this:

PVE Update Repositories