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It really depends on your budget and use case. Do you want this box to function as a NAS too? How many VMs/Containers do you anticipate (take your number and double it to future proof your setup)

I currently have a virtualized pfsense instance in my proxmox box, I think the easiest way to handle the support is to get a separate NIC and do PCI Passthrough to your VM, I used an HP NC364T as it was cheap and supported. This allows you to not have to deal with configuring the oddities of forwarding network interfaces and virtual network ports and lets pfsense's setup go significantly smoother.

If you plan on having multiple HDDs, I'm a huge fan of the Fractal Design Node 804 Case

Just FYI, you can install and setup PfSense in like 15 minutes or less, so it's not really a big deal to do. PfBlockerng can take upwards of 30minutes but there are guides you can follow step by step. The longest part is really just entering the block lists.

Honestly unless you have extreme high availability needs where you absolutely need to migrate vms from one proxmox instance to another to avoid downtime, I wouldn't cluster. As you'll find out it will mostly go unused.

I've looked into the controversy of whether you need ecc ram for ZFS and from what I can tell if you don't already have ecc ram with a motherboard to support it I wouldn't bother as it's just not necessary.

You listed Unraid and Freenas but I'm going to recommend OpenMediaVault as that's what I run and prefer. You can install this in a VM and pass through all of the storage drives you want to it.

Now if it were me working with the given hardware,

For the Proxmox machine I would:

Use the intel cpu

Use 3 of your 4 sticks of 4GB RAM (this is a case where capacity is more important than dual channel benefits)

Use the gtx 960 for vm passthrough (like for plex)

Use that 1000w corsair psu

Throw in every ssd and hdd you have

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For the (eventual) PfSense machine I would:

Buy the 30USD Intel PRO/1000 Pt Dual Port Server Adapter

Use the FX-6300 and 1 of your 4 sticks of 4GB RAM.

Install on the smallest SSD you have (requirements list minimum 4GB)

Use the 430w psu

If you're asking for a book to get you rolling from complete novice, to mostly an expert, then i highly recommend Mastering Proxmox, 3rd Edition, by Wasim Ahmed

To answer your other specific questions:

> Is it easy to control my Proxmox (create and start new VMs etc.) by remote control

Yes. Proxmox is a Debian based linux distribution. If you're familiar with debian, proxmox should feel nearly identical.

It has no GUI, but does have a web interface. You can easily manage the machine and all your VM's on it remotely by accessing your LAN through a VPN. I run my VPN on a virtual machine hosted on Proxmox.

SSH is also an option, but you should still use a VPN for this as well.

> My day to day driver is a KDE NEON machine with VirtMan installed. Can it control my proxmox machine?

VirtMan is a tool used to control QEMU Virtual machines on your local machine, or on a remote machine.

While you could potentially use this to control your VM's on proxmox with a little hacking, i would recommend sticking to the CLI or Web Interface that proxmox provides instead.

If you have an adapter, you can pas the USB device to the VM with relative ease. The VM has full control of the device. Much in the same way that you would pass a USB flash drive, mouse, or keyboard.

The Serial Port that you are adding is only really for Host to Guest stuff like SPICE: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Serial_Terminal

I think there is a way with editing the VM's .conf file. like adding args: -serial /dev/ttyS0 or something like that, I could be wrong.

USB us much easier to deal with and fairly inexpensive. Example

This is my server case that I use. I use these cables to go from the back plane to these PCIe sata cards. Back when I used to have my server running Windows I had bought a RAID controller. It wasn't until after I switched to proxmox that I found out the controller wasn't compatible. I think this is a much cheaper option, and I already have multiple of these so my server is pretty much already filled. That is a good idea though. I just didn't really find a good authoritative list on what RAID controllers actually work well with proxmox a few years ago, that is why I went this route. Thanks for the idea though

It's honestly way easier to get a cheap SATA PCIe controller, attach the BD drive to it and pass the controller through to the VM. You can get controllers for around 20 bucks (eg. this one from amazon.com). PCI passthrough on Proxmox is experimental, but the setup is well documented.

And you generally won't need to, I only ever go to the host GPU if I need to do a BIOS update.

Another option to not have duplicate kb/mouse is USB controller pass through if your mobo has multiple USB controllers. Then you have one set of USB ports for your VM and one set for your host, label them and just move the kb/mouse/monitor to the host ports/gpu when you need to do something on the host.

I use this card for my host GPU just because it doesn't require active cooling. There are probably slightly cheaper cards out there or go find something used on craigslist.

Those numbers are from when the vms were down.

I turned off atime, and it helped but still seems abnormally low (particularly fsyncs):

BUFFERED READS: 99.62 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 22.30 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND: 15.98
DNS EXT: 62.14 ms

Here's the drive:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M1NHCZT
It is a 5400 RPM disk. Sounds like it's unsuitable. Would you expect such low io numbers then?

And the server:
https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/Mini-ITX/SYS-E200-8D.cfm

I'm I crazy for expecting better performance out of the drive? If I was running everything in the containers directly on the host, I wouldn't expect IO to be an issue at all.

Actually I am brand new to using proxmox and just installed it two days ago on a test machine.

I downloaded the ISO and used my Zalman drive as a virtual cdrom for the install.


https://www.amazon.com/Zalman-ZM-VE350-External-Enclosure-ZM-V350B/dp/B019C23H06/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1524777821&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=zalman%2Busb%2Bios&th=1

I long ago gave up on trying to create boot able USB install images, because half would fail to install or if they did work, there was a small chance of weird errors like your experiencing.

Other than trying a different USB drive though, have you verified the MD5 sig of the iso file, and/or tried downloading a different copy of it?