How to deploy Proxmox as a VM in VMware ESX 7/8

To be able to deploy Proxmox as a VM inside VMware, you will need to create a new Port group on the vSwitch that has access to your public network.

In a production environment you should be using a dedicated vSwitch for data traffic, vSwitch0 should be used exclusively for management network.

In the following example vSwitch0 is our public network and ProxMoxNetwork is our new Port group.

Press “Add Networking” and select “Virtual Machine Port Group for a standard Switch”

Make sure to select vSwitch0

Give the new Port group a good name.

Once created you want to edit the settings of this new port group and modify the security settings as follows:

Save the settings.

Now you can proceed with creating a new VM to deploy Proxmox, give it plenty of CPU and Memory to cover your testing needs.

Once the deployment has completed you will need to manually edit on the Proxmox host the /etc/network/interfaces file and add the following line to your public network adapter vmbr0

iface vmbr0 inet static
address 10.200.32.128/22
gateway 10.200.32.3
bridge-ports ens192
bridge-stp off
bridge-fd 0
bridge-ageing 0

Reboot the Proxmox host to activate the change.

Make sure to assign “ProxmoxNetwork” Port group as the first network of your new Proxmox host VM.

At this point if you deploy a new VM’s inside your Proxmox Host they should be able to get DHCP IP addresses from an external DHCP server on your public network.