Day 1 — Proxmox install and the NVMe confusion

First real entry. Got the M90Q out of the box, flashed the Proxmox ISO with Rufus in DD mode, and booted from USB.

The NVMe problem

The M90Q has two NVMe slots. Both had Lexar drives installed. Proxmox installer saw both as identical — same capacity, nothing to distinguish them visually in the TUI.

The Windows 11 OEM license is tied to the motherboard. If I wipe that drive, I lose the license activation. So I had to figure out which was which before confirming the install target.

What I did: booted a live USB, ran lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,MODEL,SERIAL and cross-referenced the serial number against the drive physically labelled on the underside of the chassis. Turns out nvme0n1 was the one without Windows — confirmed by checking partition table with fdisk -l.

Install

Installed Proxmox targeting nvme0n1 with ZFS (RAID0 — single disk). Left nvme1n1 completely untouched.

Post-install, the first thing was cleaning up the repos:

rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.list
echo "deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve bookworm pve-no-subscription" \
  > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-community.list
apt update && apt dist-upgrade -y

Subscription nag popup is annoying but harmless. There’s a JS patch that removes it — skipped it for now, I’m fine clicking past it.

LVM thin pool

Added the SATA SSD (sda, 512GB TS512G) as an LVM thin pool for VM disk storage:

pvcreate /dev/sda
vgcreate pve-sata /dev/sda
lvcreate -l 100%FREE --thinpool pve-sata/data

Then registered it in Proxmox UI as local-lvm storage. This gives me room to actually create VMs without eating into the ZFS root pool.

What’s next

• Set up the domain controller VM (Windows Server 2025 Eval)
• Configure Tailscale for remote access
• Figure out Postfix relay so I can get email alerts from Proxmox

Logged: M90Q Gen 3 — Proxmox baseline complete.