⚙ Personal Lab Notes

Proxmox Guides

Running Proxmox VE on Meteor Lake with a Blackmagic eGPU Pro. Everything that broke, and exactly how it got fixed.

Proxmox VE 9.1.6 Core Ultra 7 165H Vega 56 / Thunderbolt 4 Ollama 0.18.x
Guides

Deploying Ubuntu 24.04 via Cloud-Init

✓ Working

Fully automated Ubuntu 24.04 LTS VM provisioning on Proxmox using the noble cloud image and cloud-init — no interactive installer. Covers qm create, disk import and resize, SSH key injection, DHCP discovery, and a ready-to-use SSH alias. Boots in under 2 minutes.

cloud-init ubuntu 24.04 qm create local-lvm virtio q35

Local LLM + RAG Pipeline ↗

✓ Working

Install Ollama on the Ubuntu VM, expose the API to the local network, deploy Open WebUI and Chroma via Docker, and build a private RAG pipeline that indexes local files using nomic-embed-text embeddings. Nothing leaves the network.

ollama open-webui chroma rag nomic-embed-text docker

SSH Public Key Authentication

✓ Reference

Password-free SSH across the lab. Covers key generation, pushing keys to Proxmox and guest VMs via ssh-copy-id, cloud-init injection at provisioning time, Proxmox-to-guest access for automation, SSH config aliases, and permission troubleshooting.

ssh-keygen ssh-copy-id authorized_keys cloud-init sshd_config

VM Management CLI Guide

✓ Reference

Managing Proxmox QEMU/KVM VMs from the command line using qm. TL;DR cheat sheet up top, then deep dives into serial console setup, guest agent, snapshots, and cloning. Advanced section covers disk ops, cloud-init, migration, diagnostics, and the full command reference.

qm qm terminal serial console qemu-guest-agent disk ops migration

Container Management CLI Guide

✓ Reference

Managing Proxmox LXC containers from the command line using pct. Covers pct enter for instant root shell access, start/stop, snapshots, cloning, file transfer between host and container, and mounting a stopped container's filesystem for recovery. Includes a containers vs. VMs comparison.

pct lxc pct enter pct console snapshots unprivileged

TB4 eGPU Passthrough — Blackmagic eGPU Pro

✓ Working

End-to-end walkthrough for passing a Thunderbolt 4 external GPU through to a KVM VM. Covers every failure in sequence: wrong cable, TB authorization, boot hangs, NIC renaming, AMD Vega's missing FLR, ROCm deprecation, and landing on Vulkan for Ollama inference. 85 tok/s on llama3.2 via the RADV Vulkan backend.

vfio-pci thunderbolt vendor-reset kernel 6.17 Vega 10 / gfx900 Vulkan / RADV Ollama Secure Boot / MOK

Hardware

Host
ASUS NUC 14 PRO
CPU
Intel Core Ultra 7 165H (Meteor Lake)
Proxmox
VE 9.1.6 · kernel 6.17.13-2-pve
eGPU
Blackmagic eGPU Pro · Vega 56 · 8GB HBM2
Connection
Thunderbolt 4 host · TB3 device (JHL7440)
Target VM
Ubuntu 24.04 · Ollama 0.18.x