Proxmox on NixOS

This project is a port of the Proxmox Hypervisor on NixOS.

⚠️ Proxmox-NixOS is still experimental and we do not advise running it on production machines. Do it at your own risk and only if you are ready to fix issues by yourself.

🚦 Supported features

Proxmox-NixOS has been tested on real hardware with most basic features of Proxmox (booting VMs, user management, etc), more involved setups (clusters, HA, etc) are still under development and testing.

🗃️ Cache

Some Proxmox packages have a quite power intensive build process. We make a cache available to download directly the artifacts:

• address: https://cache.saumon.network/proxmox-nixos
• public key: proxmox-nixos:nveXDuVVhFDRFx8Dn19f1WDEaNRJjPrF2CPD2D+m1ys=

🚀 Quick start

With npins

Add proxmox-nixos as a dependency of your npins project.

$ npins add github SaumonNet proxmox-nixos -b main
[INFO ] Adding 'proxmox-nixos' …
    repository: https://github.com/SaumonNet/proxmox-nixos.git
    branch: main
    revision: ...
    url: https://github.com/saumonnet/proxmox-nixos/archive/$revision.tar.gz
    hash: ...

Below is a fragment of a NixOS configuration that enables Proxmox VE.

# file: configuration.nix
{ pkgs, lib, ... }:
let
    sources = import ./npins;
    proxmox-nixos = import sources.proxmox-nixos;
in
{
  imports = [ proxmox-nixos.nixosModules.proxmox-ve ];
  services.proxmox-ve.enable = true;
  nixpkgs.overlays = [
    proxmox-nixos.overlays.x86_64-linux
  ];
  # The rest of your configuration...
}

With Flakes

Below is a fragment of a NixOS configuration that enables Proxmox VE.

{
  description = "A flake with Proxmox VE enabled";

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
    proxmox-nixos.url = "github:SaumonNet/proxmox-nixos";
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, proxmox-nixos, ...}: {
    nixosConfigurations = {
      yourHost = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem rec {
        system = "x86_64-linux";
        modules = [

          proxmox-nixos.nixosModules.proxmox-ve

          ({ pkgs, lib, ... }: {
            services.proxmox-ve.enable = true;
            nixpkgs.overlays = [
              proxmox-nixos.overlays.${system}
            ];

            # The rest of your configuration...
          })
        ];
      };
    };
  };
}

🌐 Networking

To get internet in your VMs, you need to add a network device to the VM, connected to a bridge. To get this working, follow this 2 steps:

1. Create the bridge in System->Network->Create->Linux Bridge. This operation has no effect on your system and is just a quirk for Proxmox to know the existence of your bridge.
2. Configure your networking through NixOS configuration so that the bridge you created in the Proxmox web interface actually exists!

Example NixOS networking configurations

Any kind of advanced networking configuration is possible through the usual NixOS options, but here are basic examples that can get you started:

With systemd-networkd

systemd.network.networks."10-lan" = {
    matchConfig.Name = [ "ens18" ];
    networkConfig = {
    Bridge = "vmbr0";
    };
};

systemd.network.netdevs."vmbr0" = {
    netdevConfig = {
        Name = "vmbr0";
        Kind = "bridge";
    };
};

systemd.network.networks."10-lan-bridge" = {
    matchConfig.Name = "vmbr0";
    networkConfig = {
    IPv6AcceptRA = true;
    DHCP = "ipv4";
    };
    linkConfig.RequiredForOnline = "routable";
};

With scripted networking

networking.bridges.vmbr0.interfaces = [ "ens18" ];
networking.interfaces.vmbr0.useDHCP = lib.mkDefault true;

🚧 Roadmap

• Support for clusters / HA with Ceph
• More coverage of NixOS tests
• Proxmox backup server

Thanks

This project has received support from NLNet.