Using a Raspberry Pi as a Thin Client for Proxmox VMs

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is quite a buzz-word now in enterprise computing, and it’s something I’d like to experiment more with in my homelab. Essentially, it’s a new way to describe old school terminal servers, but with modern features and marketing. The primary difference is that VDI normally implies that each ‘seat’ is a virtual machine and has some resources associated with it, as opposed to a terminal session running on a shared server. By using VDI, an admin can centralize all of the compute resources and the end devices only need to provide an interface (video / keyboard / mouse), and also guarantee resources such as RAM or GPU to the virtual desktop (something a terminal server does not do). This means the end devices can be significantly cheaper, since they aren’t doing much real work, although they now have to deal with a video stream of the virtual desktop.

In my specific use case, I would like to use a Raspberry Pi attached to the back of the monitor as a general purpose PC in the kitchen. I could just use the Pi itself, or a more expensive device like a NUC, but I already have a Raspberry Pi B+ and a perfectly useful server, so putting compute resources on the server would be ideal for me. Plus, I’d like to expand my knowledge of the different methods for VDI over the next few months, and this is a good start. Continue reading

How to Install Proxmox on the Raspberry Pi

Preparing your Raspberry Pi for Proxmox

1. Our first task before installing Proxmox onto the Raspberry Pi is to update the package list cache and upgrade any out-of-date packages.

You can perform both tasks by using the following two commands within the terminal.

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade

2. Your next step is to ensure that curl is installed on your Pi. We will be using curl to grab the GPG key for the Proxmox ports repository that we will be relying on.

You can install this package by using the following command within the terminal.

$ sudo apt install curl

3. Before proceeding with this tutorial, you must set up your Raspberry Pi to use a static IP address.

The best way to do this is using DHCP reservation in your router. However, we have a guide that shows you how to do this through your Raspberry Pi if you don’t have access to your router. Continue reading