Hypervisor hosts

Hypervisor hosts are the physical (or nested) machines your lab VMs and simulators run on: Proxmox VE, VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation Pro or Linux KVM/libvirt.

Add a host

1. Open Hypervisor hosts and click Add host.
2. Fill in what you know. Only Name and Hypervisor are required:
   • Version, Hostname / FQDN, Management IPv4 and Management IPv6 (with prefix, e.g. 10.0.10.11/24).
   • Hardware / platform, CPU model, Sockets, Physical cores, Logical threads and RAM (GB). Threads are used to work out the vCPU overcommit ratio.
   • Location / rack and Notes.
3. Under Storage pools / datastores, add each pool with its name (e.g. local-zfs, datastore1), type (ZFS, VMFS, NFS, Ceph) and capacity in GB.
4. Save.

Read a host’s page

Click a host to open its page:

• Allocation: vCPU, RAM and storage given to its VMs and containers, compared with what the host has. Overcommit shows in Documentation health on the Overview.
• Storage pools: each pool’s type and capacity.
• Networks available on this host: the networks from the IP address plan scoped to this host, with bridge / port group and VLAN.
• VMs & containers: everything running on the host. + Add workload adds one here directly (see VMs & containers).

Sync a Proxmox VE host automatically

Hosts of type Proxmox VE get a Proxmox sync card. It reads the Proxmox API with a read-only token and fills in the host’s hardware, storage pools, VMs and containers, and networks.

1. Create a read-only token (once per cluster, or once per standalone host)

In the Proxmox web UI, open the node’s Shell and run:

pveum user add netsimlab@pve --comment "NetSimLab read-only"
pveum acl modify / --users netsimlab@pve --roles PVEAuditor
pveum user token add netsimlab@pve docs --privsep 0

The last command shows the token secret once. Copy it.

Note

To also read VM IP addresses through the QEMU guest agent, the token needs VM.Monitor (PVE 8) or VM.GuestAgent.Audit (PVE 9). PVEAuditor doesn’t include them. Without them, VM addresses you documented are kept as they are.

2. Connect

Connection settings can only be changed by an admin.

1. On the host’s page, in Proxmox sync, enter the Proxmox URL (e.g. https://10.10.10.11:8006), the API token ID (netsimlab@pve!docs) and the Token secret.
2. Tick Allow self-signed certificate if the host still uses Proxmox’s default certificate.
3. Click Test connection. In a cluster, pick which Node this host is (it’s chosen automatically when the names match).

The secret stays on the NetSimLab server. It is never sent back to the browser or included in exports and backups.

3. Sync

1. Click Sync from Proxmox…. A preview lists what will change: host fields, new and updated VMs / containers, and networks.
2. Leave Create networks for VLAN tags used by guests ticked if you want a network created for each VLAN tag your guests use. You fill in their subnets afterwards.
3. Click Apply sync.

What the sync keeps: the host name, hardware model, location, notes, storage pool descriptions, workload notes, simulation platform details, and any address Proxmox can’t see. Guests are matched by VMID. Guests that are gone from Proxmox are listed but not deleted. A snapshot of your data is taken before every sync, so you can undo it from Export & backup.

Tip

Re-run the sync whenever you add or change VMs in Proxmox. Only the differences are applied.