How to Install Proxmox on a Raspberry Pi

Install Proxmox on a Raspberry Pi

Proxmox officially announced in early August 2026 compatibility of Proxmox Virtual Environment for 64-bit ARM platforms. However, you need a machine with UEFI, and Raspberry Pi devices are not officially supported. We’ll see how to install it anyway.

For the demo, I have a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB, connected to the network via RJ45. The OS must be a Raspberry Pi OS Lite on Trixie minimum, or any compatible Debian Trixie OS. For this tutorial, I recommend working as root. Otherwise, add sudo at the start of each command.

1. Disable cloud-init

   To configure Proxmox VE, we’ll need to change how networking is handled. To avoid overwriting the configuration on every reboot, but still keep the ability to run cloud-init for VMs, we’ll disable cloud-init management on the machine without uninstalling it:

   touch /etc/cloud/cloud-init.disabled

   After this step, you can resume the official installation documentation by skipping the step for installing the Proxmox kernel.

2. Configure the network

   In this example, the Raspberry Pi uses 192.168.3.50 and the gateway 192.168.3.1. Adapt these two values to your network.

   Configure the hostname. Replace 127.0.0.1 before your hostname with your IP:

   nano /etc/hosts

   ...
   192.168.3.50 pve2 pve2
   127.0.0.1 localhost
   ...

   You can verify the change has been applied by running: hostname --ip-address

   Proxmox uses ifupdown2. Install ifupdown2 and remove NetworkManager:

   apt install -y ifupdown2
   apt autopurge -y network-manager

   Then edit the interface file to create the bridge, adjusting it with your IP and gateway:

   nano /etc/network/interfaces

   auto lo
   iface lo inet loopback
   
   iface eth0 inet manual
   
   auto vmbr0
   iface vmbr0 inet static
           address 192.168.3.50/24
           gateway 192.168.3.1
           bridge-ports eth0
           bridge-stp off
           bridge-fd 0

3. Add the Proxmox VE repository

   cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-install-repo.sources << 'EOF'
   Types: deb
   URIs: http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve
   Suites: trixie
   Components: pve-no-subscription
   Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/proxmox-archive-keyring.gpg
   EOF

   Then download the GPG key:

   wget https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/proxmox-archive-keyring-trixie.gpg \
     -O /usr/share/keyrings/proxmox-archive-keyring.gpg

4. Update Debian

   Do a quick “spring cleaning” by installing the latest packages and removing anything left over from older ones.

   apt update
   apt -y full-upgrade
   apt -y autopurge

5. Install Proxmox VE

   Install the main components:

   apt install -y proxmox-ve postfix open-iscsi chrony

   Then remove os-prober, which can sometimes cause issues:

   apt autopurge -y os-prober

   The Enterprise repository is installed by default. If you don’t have a subscription, disable it:

   echo 'Enabled: no' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.sources

   Then verify that everything went well:

   systemctl --failed

   The command should only return an error:

     UNIT                 LOAD   ACTIVE SUB    DESCRIPTION
   ● watchdog-mux.service loaded failed failed Proxmox VE watchdog multiplexer
   
   Legend: LOAD   → Reflects whether the unit definition was properly loaded.
           ACTIVE → The high-level unit activation state, i.e. generalization of S>
           SUB    → The low-level unit activation state, values depend on unit typ>

   We’ll fix this minor issue later.

6. Create the Proxmox VE user

   By default, Raspberry Pi OS configures a user with sudo and a root account without a password. The only account configured with PAM authentication for administration access is root, but you won’t have the password. You can set a password for root, or (simpler) create an administrator Proxmox account for your user.

   For example:

   pveum user add admin@pam

   Assign it administrator privileges:

   pveum acl modify / --users admin@pam --roles Administrator

   Replace admin with the name of the account you want to use.

7. Access Proxmox VE

   From a browser:

   https://192.168.3.50:8006

   Replace 192.168.3.50 with the IP address configured earlier.

   Log in with your @pam user.

8. Disable the watchdog

   Raspberry Pi OS and Proxmox VE each have a watchdog. To avoid conflicts, we disable the one from Raspberry Pi OS.
   Create the directory:

   mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system.conf.d

   Then create the configuration file:

   cat > /etc/systemd/system.conf.d/99-no-watchdog.conf <<'EOF'
   [Manager]
   RuntimeWatchdogSec=0
   EOF

   Reboot to apply the change.

   reboot

   After the reboot, run again:

   systemctl --failed

   This time it should return:

     UNIT LOAD ACTIVE SUB DESCRIPTION
   
   0 loaded units listed.

Proxmox on Raspberry Pi

This installation lets you experiment with Proxmox VE on ARM64 on a Raspberry Pi. You can test your favorite VMs and LXC containers—just make sure to use the ARM64 versions. If you own multiple Raspberry Pis, you might even be able to experiment with a cluster.

That said, this solution shouldn’t be considered an officially supported Proxmox installation for a production server. Beyond the low performance, I’m concerned about the lifespan of the SD card for this kind of use. Using an M.2 setup would likely be more appropriate.

For a standard, officially supported Proxmox server, choose an x86-64 or ARM-64 UEFI machine. UEFI projects exist specifically for the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, so it’s worth testing!

If you’re interested in installing an encrypted version of Raspberry Pi OS, you can find the method on my blog.