I recently migrate one of the old servers running VMware Hypervisor to KVM-based solution.

Installing Proxmox Virtual Environment

Installing Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) is as easy as installing Debian. Just download the ISO image without any registration, create a bootable USB and boot. I actually use Ventoy because it claims to boot Debian and it worked seamlessly.

But I've got failure after some simple configuration - the installer told me:

hardisk /dev/sdk too small (8GB)

I installed VMware Hypervisor on a 8GB USB key and it has been working well. As I have other storage for VM data, there is no need for over 8GB for a minimal hypervisor system to store caches. I searched, and I found related topics blaming the limitation.

Install proxmox in a 8GB USB not possible

Hi there, I’m trying to install proxmox in a USB key. I tried using an 8GB key which is recognized as 7.2GB and proxmox (both 3.4 and 4.0) complain that it’s not big enough. This is weird because the proxmox 3.4 that I have installed at the moment in a hard drive is only using 1.3GB of disk...

Proxmox Support Forumlince

Can you lower the installation disk limit from 8GB to 7GB ?

Hello, My request is related to this thread: http://forum.proxmox.com/threads/24718-Install-proxmox-in-a-8GB-USB-not-possible I tried installing proxmox in two different 8GB usb and I can’t because of this limit. Could you lower this limit to 7GB ? Thanks.

Proxmox Support Forumlince

And I eventually solve this problem in a simple way: I found any other Sandisk Cruzer Fit but provides 16GB. This time the installation went well without any extra configuration.

Passing-through LSI HBA Card

First of all, enable iommu and setup VFIO for the host:

Fix IOMMU Groups

After the storage VM is configured, I continued to boot and found the network lost. After some digging, I found that whenever I boot the VM the network connection is down.

Follow the "Verify IOMMU Isolation" part in the official wiki:

Fix CentOS Ramdisk Drivers

For RHEL, CentOS and other based distro, dracut will generate initramfs containing only the drivers for hardware on host. But we can use dracut to re-generate ramdisk with virtio drivers to make the system bootable:

sudo dracut --add-drivers "virtio_pci virtio_blk virtio_scsi virtio_net virtio_ring virtio" -f -v /boot/initramfs-`uname -r`.img `uname -r`

Then power off and start the VM off, the drivers should load and system will boot.

References: Re: SCSI generic driver not loading at boot