Your new Hetzner server likely comes with a default operating system installed. To install Proxmox, we first need to reboot the server into a special recovery environment called the rescue system. You can do this from the Hetzner Robot control panel.

Once the server boots into the rescue system, you'll be able to log in via SSH using the provided root password. This environment gives us direct access to the server's hardware and disks, preparing a clean slate for the Proxmox installation.

Hetzner provides a convenient script called installimage that automates OS installations. We'll use this tool to install Debian, which is the foundation of Proxmox VE. To start the process, simply run the command in your SSH session:

This will launch an interactive menu that guides you through the setup.

The installimage script presents a menu where you can select the operating system and configure the server's disk layout. First, select Debian as your OS. Proxmox VE is built on top of Debian, so this is a required first step before we add the Proxmox components later.

The most important part of this configuration is setting up the partitions. It's best practice to use Logical Volume Management (LVM). Think of LVM as creating a flexible pool of storage from your physical disks. Instead of carving out fixed-size partitions, you can create logical volumes that can be resized easily later. This is incredibly useful for managing virtual machine disks.

Here is an example of what the partition configuration might look like inside the installimage configuration file. This setup creates a small boot partition and allocates the rest of the disk space to an LVM volume group named vg0.

After you save the configuration file (press F10 and confirm), the script will wipe the drives and install Debian according to your settings. This process can take a few minutes. Once it's complete, the script will prompt you to reboot the server.

Now that Debian is installed, we need to add Proxmox to it. After rebooting, log back into the server via SSH. The next steps involve adding the Proxmox software repositories and installing the Proxmox VE packages. This is done through a series of commands.

First, we'll add the official Proxmox repository so our system knows where to download the necessary files. Then we'll update our package list and install the Proxmox VE kernel and all the required tools.

Once everything is installed and you've rebooted one last time, your Proxmox server is ready. You can access the web-based management interface by navigating to your server's IP address in a web browser, using port 8006.

You'll see a login screen. Use root as the username and the password you set during the Debian installation. You might see a warning about an SSL certificate; it's safe to proceed. You will also see a pop-up message saying you do not have a valid subscription. For testing and personal use, you can simply close this message.

You are now looking at the Proxmox VE dashboard. From here, you can manage your server node, storage, and eventually, your virtual machines and containers.