Hypervisor Lab

Since I will also be exploring many KVM based hypervisors like OpenShift Virtualization, Nutanix AHV, SUSE Virtualization, etc I am also going to set up a Linux based Jump server as my main lab workstation.

This section will walk through installing Alma Linux 10 inside of a Proxmox VM and setting up the various tools I use in my lab.

The lab will look like this at the end of the post:

Download Required ISO Files

I prefer using a RHEL based Linux OS so I am going to use Alma Linux 10 as my Linux OS. You can download the Alma ISO from here: AlmaLinux OS – Forever-Free Enterprise-Grade Operating System

Upload the ISO to your Proxmox server – I am going to upload it to my data1:

Create a DNS Entry

On the DNS server I created in my previous post I am going to create a entry for this Linux Jump Servers host name:

Create the Linux Server VM

With the DNS entry created its time to build the Linux VM. Right click on your Proxmox server and select Create VM to launch the Wizard:

In the General section I’m going to call my VM server linuxjump01, have it turn on when Proxmox turns on, and I’m going to give it a tag of “lab-mgmt”:

In the OS section set the OS to Linux and provide the ISO file:

In the System section choose Q35 for the Machine, UEFI for the BIOS with the EFI disk on data1, VirtIO SCSI as the SCSI Controller, and enable the Qemu agent:

In the Disks section set the Bus to VirtIO Block, the storage to data1, give a size (I’m using 240G for all VM boot disks) and make sure to check Discard:

In CPU give you VM however many vCPUs you want – I am going to start off with 4x vCPUs. For this make sure to set the Type to Host as I had issues using the default x86-64-v2-AES for Linux:

In the Memory section I am going to allow memory ballooning and give my VM 8GB of memory with 4GB being the minimum:

In the Network section make sure to choose your 10G Linux Bridge. Since I don’t want to do any VLAN tagging inside the VM I am going to set a VLAN tag on the vNIC to my management network 105:

When Ready you can easily boot the VM from its Console. I do it this way so I can catch the early prompts on booting from the ISO:

Install Alma Linux

Once the VM has booted off the ISO to the Alma Linux Installer start by configuring the NIC under Network & Host Name

Click Configure on your NIC and go to the IPv4 section to set the permanent IP address, netmask, DNS, and DNS domain:

Then click on IPv6 and disable it:

After clicking save you can also set the hostname using the field at the bottom. Mine looks like this once completed:

Next navigate to the Installation Destination section so we can set up the boot disk:

Choose Custom and then click Done to launch the Manual Partition wizard:

Click create automatically to get started:

I like to delete the /home partition and then expand the root (/) partition for simplicity and so I don’t have to deal with my other partitions filling up like this:

Once you have made that change click Done and Accept the changes:

Next click on Software Selection – I am going to choose workstation to get some additional packages pre-installed:

Finally set a root password and create a non-root user:

At this point you can now begin the installation:

Reboot once the installation is complete:

Configure Alma Linux

Once you log into Alma launch a terminal session (or SSH to the VM) since we will configure everything with the command line.

To start I am going to enable the EPEL and Code Builder repositories since they come in handy when installing tools later. Once those are enabled update Alma Linux to the latest version:

sudo dnf install epel-release -y 
sudo crb enable
sudo dnf update -y

Next I am going to disable SELinux so that it does not get in the way since this is a lab:

sudo vim /etc/selinux/config 

Next I am going to install some useful tools that will show up later in my guides:

sudo dnf install filezilla java-21-openjdk java-21-openjdk-devel wget telnet p7zip git virt-viewer virt-manager jq gnome-remote-desktop cifs-utils tar -y
sudo dnf copr enable castor/remmina -y
sudo dnf install 'remmina*' -y

Many of those tools are likely familiar. The tool Remmina is the application I use most as it allows you to store and connect to multiple RDP and SSH sessions:

I am also going to install Microsoft Edge as I tend to use that more the Firefox/Chrome:

sudo rpm --import https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc
sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://packages.microsoft.com/yumrepos/edge
sudo dnf install microsoft-edge-stable -y

Next I am going to enable Remote Desktop by going to Settings -> System -> Remote Desktop -> Remote Login:

Create a username and password for RDP (I am using the same username/password as my “administrator” account to keep it simple):

Make sure to open the firewall port for RDP:

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=3389/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Then before trying to RDP to the VM perform a reboot:

sudo reboot

After the reboot you will now be able to use any RDP client to connect remotely to your Linux VM:

In my lab I have a CIFS/SMB NAS share I use to store files, ISOs, scripts, etc so that I can access them regardless of if I am working in Windows or Linux. I am going to permanently mount this NAS share at /mnt/smb so that I can access it like any other folder in Linux:

#Create a file with your NAS server credentials, I am storing it in /root
cat << 'EOF' > /root/.cifs_credentials
username=YOUR_NAS_USER
password=YOUR_NAS_PASSWORD
domain=lab.local
EOF
#Create a directoy to mount up the NAS share
sudo mkdir /mnt/smb
sudo chmod 777 /mnt/smb
#Edit fstab to mount the NAS share at boot
sudo vim /etc/fstab
#Add the following line to fstab
//192.168.105.15/smb /mnt/smb cifs  credentials=/root/.cifs_credentials,uid=1000,gid=1000,_netdev 0 0

Then to mount it up for the first time:

sudo mount -a
ls /mnt/smb

Another setting I like to change on my Linux VM is to install the “Gnome Dash to Dock” to give a Dock at the bottom of the display similar to what I am used to in Windows:

Dash to Dock – GNOME Shell Extensions

You can install it directly from its website:

I am also going to install LibreOffice since its sometimes handy to have Word and Excel like functionality:

Download LibreOffice | LibreOffice – Free and private office suite – Based on OpenOffice – Compatible with Microsoft

After you download the tar.gz you can install it with the command line:

tar -xvf LibreOffice_26.2.1_Linux_x86-64_rpm.tar.gz
cd LibreOffice_26.2.1.2_Linux_x86-64_rpm/RPMS
sudo dnf install *.rpm -y

Once all the RPMs installed you will see the full LibreOffice suite installed:

This concludes setting up our Linux Jump Server / Workstation. At this point we are ready to start deploying nested hypervisor clusters to test ESXi alternatives!