In this one I’m taking Proxmox VE 9 for a spin on my Lenovo Edge SE450—yeah, the enterprise “beast” that makes remote installs actually tolerable. I didn’t feel like walking a USB stick over to the rack, so I mounted the ISO remotely, booted UEFI virtual media, and did a clean Proxmox 9 install. I also call out the big “don’t mess this up” moment: picking the right disk when you’ve got a pile of NVMe and SSDs in the box. After first boot, I do my usual housekeeping—adding NFS storage from my Synology for ISO images and backups, then wiping a local 1TB drive and setting it up as a quick-and-dirty ext4 directory store for VMs. Then I get into the real reason for the video: ProxMenuX. I install it (in a sandbox/lab, because scripts are scripts) and check out ProxMenu Monitor on port 2808. It’s a clean dashboard with system info, storage, SMART status, thermals, PCI devices, and VM visibility—honestly pretty handy. I also run the automated post-install stuff to flip repos over (repositories, not suppositories), update Proxmox, and optionally remove the subscription banner. Finally, I use ProxMenuX to enable VFIO/IOMMU for PCI passthrough, verify the GRUB changes, and even spin up a Docker VM using the built-in helper scripts—because my favorite flavor of Linux is Debian and it just makes sense.