Setting up Virtual private servers via Proxmox on a ‘DelimiterVPS’ dedicated server

DelimiterVPS had a nice offer for a value-for-money Dedicated server, the other day. I pounced on my chance to add another dedicated server to my collection. The other one is an Online.net Euro 5.99 server that I have been using for the past year. The server provisioning was quick (within two hours of payment). I paid via Paypal.

Now about setting up the server for creating VPSes..

First, go to https://clients.delimitervps.com/clientarea.php, and login to your account.
Choose the Reinstall server option.
Under ‘Installation Profile’, choose ‘Proxmox VE 3.0’.
Choose a good enough root password. From personal experience, I’d avoid special characters in my root password. I had setup a very complex password once, and found that it was not accepted by the ssh login shell. It’s likely that WHMCS does not escape special characters very well.
Choose ‘Provision Server (Warning)’.

At this point, go back to the email you received from DelimiterVPS, and read the part about KVM/ILO Configuration. You can login to ILO and watch the installation progress. Once installation is done, Proxmox is supposed to be up and running at https://yourip::8006. However we need a couple of steps and a reboot before we can use it.

First, you have to remove the default Linux kernel, and set the OpenVZ kernel to start at boot.
Run the following from the shell:

apt-get remove linux-image-amd64 linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64 linux-base
update-grub

You’ll notice that openvz based kernels have now been added to grub (the bootloader).

If you’d prefer a login screen with Cloudflare SSL, you’d want to change the default Proxmox web panel port from 8006 to 2053, 2083, 2087, 2096, or 8443. (See https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200169156-Which-ports-will-CloudFlare-work-with-)

Do this:

sed -i 's/port => 8006/port => 2096/' /usr/bin/pveproxy
service pveproxy restart

Enable IP forwarding is setup:
Edit the file /etc/sysctl.conf, and uncomment (Remove the # at the beginning) the following line:

#net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

You can just run the following:

sed -i "s/#net.ipv4.ip_forward=1/net.ipv4.ip_forward=1/g" /etc/sysctl.conf
sysctl -p

Now, restart the server.

You can now login to Proxmox at:

https://yourdomainname.com:2096 (If you changed the IP for Cloudflare DNS),

or

https://yourip:8006 (Default Proxmox login URL).

Choose your server’s root password with Linux PAM authentication.

Before creating VPSes, you need to download OpenVZ templates to the server.
Click on server, and ‘local(server)’ under ‘server’.
Click on the tab ‘Content’
Click on Templates,
Under Section:system, choose to download templates you require.

Now to create a new VPS, Click on ‘Create CT’, enter the following:
Node and VM ID should be automatically populated.
Enter hostname for your VPS: test1.mydomain.com
Password: Choose a complex password
Confirm Password.

Click on Next.
Choose a template from the dropdown.
Click on Next.
Now, choose values for Memory, Swap, Disk size, CPU.
Click on Next.
Choose routed mode, enter one of the ‘additional ip addresses’ you purchased from DelimiterVPS.
Click on Next.
Click on Next again.
Click on Finish.

Your virtual server is now ready. Try logging to it via ssh.
—
To remove the Proxmox ‘You do not have a valid subscription nag popup’, run the following:

cp /usr/share/pve-manager/ext4/pvemanagerlib.js /usr/share/pve-manager/ext4/pvemanagerlib.bak.js
sed -i "s/data.status !== 'Active'/false/" /usr/share/pve-manager/ext4/pvemanagerlib.js

Credits:
MarkTurner at Lowendtalk for help with server settings