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How to Install Plex Media Server on a Proxmox Ubuntu VM

Running Plex Media Server inside a Proxmox Ubuntu virtual machine is one of the more flexible ways to self-host your media library. It keeps Plex isolated from your host system, makes snapshots and backups straightforward, and lets you allocate resources precisely. The process involves a few distinct layers — Proxmox VM creation, Ubuntu configuration, and Plex installation — each with its own variables that affect how well everything runs together.

What You're Actually Building

When you install Plex this way, you're running a full Ubuntu virtual machine on top of Proxmox VE (the bare-metal hypervisor). Plex Media Server runs inside that VM as a background service. Your media files can live on the Proxmox host and be passed through to the VM, or they can sit on network-attached storage (NAS) mounted inside the VM itself.

This is different from running Plex in a Proxmox LXC container, which is lighter but more complicated to configure for hardware transcoding. A VM gives you better compatibility and a more familiar Linux environment at the cost of slightly higher resource overhead.

Step 1: Create the Ubuntu VM in Proxmox

In the Proxmox web UI:

  1. Upload an Ubuntu Server ISO (22.04 LTS is a stable, widely-supported choice) to your Proxmox ISO storage.

  2. Click Create VM and work through the wizard:

    • OS tab: Select your uploaded ISO
    • System tab: Keep defaults; enable the QEMU Guest Agent option
    • Disks tab: Allocate at least 32 GB for the VM OS disk — Plex's metadata and database grow over time
    • CPU tab: Assign at least 2 cores; 4 is more comfortable for active transcoding
    • Memory tab:4 GB minimum; 8 GB if you expect simultaneous streams or large libraries
    • Network tab: Use the default VirtIO network adapter

  3. Start the VM and complete the standard Ubuntu Server installation. Set a static IP or configure a DHCP reservation so the VM's address doesn't change — Plex clients need a consistent target.

Step 2: Prepare the Ubuntu VM

Once Ubuntu is installed and you're logged in via SSH or the Proxmox console:

Update the system first: