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Proxmox Bible for Incredible PBX


You may recall days of yesteryear when computer rooms housed, dozens of tower-based servers. For today’s Proxmox 8 servers, that’s all a thing of the past when a single, tiny PC can support dozens of Incredible PBX virtual machines. The machine pictured below is available on Amazon for $329. It’s Beelink’s latest and greatest with an 8-Core AMD Ryzen 7 5825U CPU, 32GB DDR4, 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD,Triple Display 4K@60Hz Output, Wi-Fi 6,RJ45,Bluetooth 5.2:

1. Boot into BIOS by pressing F7 or DEL repeatedly. It’s F7 on latest machines. If Windows appears, reboot and try again.
2. Disable Secure Boot if it’s enabled.
3. Change Boot Mode from UEFI to LEGACY.
4. Adjust Boot Order so that USB boot comes first with normal drive next, not Windows partition.
5. Insert Proxmox USB stick on PC or Mac after downloading Proxmox 8 ISO and imaging ISO to USB stick using Balena Etcher.
6. Save Settings and Reboot machine.

The Proxmox installer appears. So follow your nose. After rebooting, log in as root via SSH and run: apt update | apt-get remove libjpeg-dev -y | apt dist-upgrade. Add the Proxmox free repo to /etc/apt/sources.list: deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve bookworm pve-no-subscription. Next, delete the commercial repo from /etc/apt/sources.list.d. Then reissue: apt update. Finally, remove the subscription nag by following this tutorial or…

sed -Ezi.bak "s/(function\(orig_cmd\) \{)/\1\n\torig_cmd\(\);\n\treturn;/g" /usr/share/javascript/proxmox-widget-toolkit/proxmoxlib.js && systemctl restart pveproxy.service

Now you are ready to log into the web portal at https://server-ip:8006 using the root password set up as part of the install.

Proxmox 8 Configuration Overview

Proxmox will configure your disk into two main partitions: local and local-lvm. By default, the local partition uses 10% of available disk space while local-lvm reserves the remaining 90%. Local houses backups, ISOs, and container (CT) templates while local-lvm is reserved for virtual machine (VM) disks and container (CT) volumes. Proxmox allows you to create BOTH virtual machines and containers. Use virtual machines (VMs) when you need complete OS isolation, different OS kernels, and when you need to emulate specific hardware or software configurations. Containers (LXC) are better suited for lightweight, rapid deployments, stateless applications, and microservices, especially when you want to minimize resource overhead.

Proxmox 8 Initial Setup

We recommend initially installing virtual machines and container templates for Debian 11 and 12, Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04, and Incredible PBX 2025-U and 2027-U. Here’s how. Begin by logging into the Proxmox web portal at https://server-ip:8006 using the root password set up as part of the install. Navigate to Folder View -> Storage -> local -> ISO Images. Then download the ISOs and Incredible PBX images from the following links. Default root password for Incredible PBX images is password.


Log into the Proxmox CLI and issue the following commands to install the Incredible PBX Virtual Machine Templates
cd /var/lib/vz/dump
wget https://filedn.com/lBgbGypMOdDm8PWOoOiBR7j/Proxmox/vzdump-qemu-ipbx2025u.vma.zst
wget https://filedn.com/lBgbGypMOdDm8PWOoOiBR7j/Proxmox/vzdump-qemu-ipbx2027u.vma.zst

While logged in to the Proxmox CLI as root, issue the following commands to install the recommended Container Templates:
pveam update
pveam available
pveam download local debian-11-standard_11.7-1_amd64.tar.zst
pveam download local debian-12-standard_12.7-1_amd64.tar.zst
pveam download local ubuntu-22.04-standard_22.04-1_amd64.tar.zst
pveam download local ubuntu-24.04-standard_24.04-2_amd64.tar.zst
cd /var/lib/vz/template/cache
wget https://filedn.com/lBgbGypMOdDm8PWOoOiBR7j/Proxmox/vzdump-lxc-ipbx2025u.tar.zst

Proxmox 8 Cloning Virtual Machines

The real beauty of Proxmox lies in the ability to quickly clone images which you have created to create new virtual machines or containers. For Virtual Machine cloning, here are the steps after configuring the virtual machine you wish to clone and shutting it down.

  1. Create a Backup of the VM in the Proxmox GUI.
  2. Log into the Proxmox CLI and issue the following commands where 777 is the new, unique VM identifier:
  3. cd /var/lib/vz/dump
  4. Rename the QEMU backup file as desired, e.g. vzdump-qemu-ipbx2025u.vma.zst
  5. qmrestore vzdump-qemu-ipbx2025u.vma.zst 777 --unique true

Proxmox 8 Cloning Containers

A similar, but slightly different process is used to clone existing containers after configuring them as desired:

  1. Create a Backup of the CT in the Proxmox GUI.
  2. Log into the Proxmox CLI and issue the following commands where 777 is the new, unique CT identifier:
  3. cd /var/lib/vz/dump
  4. copy the tar.zst backup file to /var/lib/vz/template/cache
  5. Rename the backup file as desired, e.g. vzdump-lxc-ipbx2025u.tar.zst
  6. Return to Proxmox web GUI
  7. In the GUI, create a New Container specifying the template just created
  8. Be sure to specify creation of a DHCP address for both IPv4 and IPv6

Configuring a New Incredible PBX Machine After Successful Cloning

Immediately after cloning a new machine, login to it using root:password and do the following:
1. Reset your root user Linux password immediately: passwd
2. Reset your admin GUI password: /root/admin-pw-change
3. Reset your admin Apache password: /root/apache-pw-change
4. Configure your correct time zone by running: /root/timezone-setup
5. Configure Gmail SmartHost: /root/enable-gmail-smarthost-for-sendmail

Resetting the DHCP IP Address of a Cloned Machine


If you forget to use the --unique switch when cloning a virtual machine or if Proxmox has a hiccup and fails to generate a new IP address for either a virtual machine or container, you can force generation of a new DHCP IP address by logging into the Proxmox Console for the affected machine and issuing the following commands:
apt-get remove libjpeg-dev -y
apt install isc-dhcp-client -y
ip addr flush ens18
dhclient ens18
ip a