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30-day lab plan · 🧊 Virtualization Engineer (Proxmox / VMware / KVM / Hyper-V)

Become job-ready as avirtualization engineer in 30 days.

One focused task a day, four weeks, ending with a portfolio and a mock interview. Built for students and engineers in India who learn by doing — about 2 hours a day on weekdays, a little more on weekends.

What you needInterview questions →Role path →
Your kit

Set up before day 1

A PC with 32 GB RAM for nested Proxmox (3 nodes), a VMware ESXi eval or Workstation, and our Proxmox sizer and Ceph vs ZFS page. Everything here is free or has a free tier; a laptop with 16 GB RAM is enough for most labs (32 GB for nested clusters).

  • Daily ruleFinish the task, write 5 lines of notes, commit to Git. Notes become your interview stories.
  • Weekend ruleDay 7 of each week is a review: redo the hardest task from memory.
  • Stuck rule30 minutes max, then ask in a community or our engineer network.
Week 1

Proxmox basics

  1. Day 1Install Proxmox VE on one VM/node; create Linux + Windows VMs with VirtIO
  2. Day 2Storage: LVM-thin vs ZFS; snapshots and clones
  3. Day 3Networking: bridges, VLAN-aware bridge, VM on a tagged VLAN
  4. Day 4Templates and cloud-init
  5. Day 5Backups to PBS; restore tests
  6. Day 6Proxmox firewall and users/API tokens
  7. Day 7Review: write your single-node standard build
Week 2

Clustering

  1. Day 83-node cluster (nested) + qdevice; corosync basics
  2. Day 9Ceph on 3 nodes; RBD pool; VM on Ceph
  3. Day 10HA groups; kill a node; watch VM restart
  4. Day 11Live migration with and without shared storage
  5. Day 12Node patching routine with migrations
  6. Day 13Monitoring the cluster with Zabbix/Prometheus (pve exporter)
  7. Day 14Review: cluster runbook (fencing, quorum loss, Ceph health)
Week 3

VMware & migration

  1. Day 15ESXi eval: create VMs; snapshots; vSwitch
  2. Day 16Export OVF; import to Proxmox; fix drivers/boot
  3. Day 17Use the Proxmox ESXi importer for a live import
  4. Day 18Windows VM: VirtIO drivers, agent, performance compare
  5. Day 19Size a 40-VM migration with our Proxmox sizer; write the TCO memo
  6. Day 20Plan cutover waves with rollback
  7. Day 21Review: migration runbook v1
Week 4

Automation & portfolio

  1. Day 22Terraform bpg provider: create 3 VMs from code
  2. Day 23Ansible post-provision config
  3. Day 24SDN in Proxmox: VNet/zone basics
  4. Day 25GPU passthrough theory + IOMMU check on your hardware
  5. Day 26Capacity plan for 2 years; hardware BOM
  6. Day 27Mock interview with our question bank
  7. Day 28Publish Terraform/Ansible repo + diagrams; update resume
After day 30

What you will have

  • A portfolio repoDiagrams, configs, scripts and runbooks a hiring manager can read in five minutes.
  • Interview storiesReal faults you fixed — the answers to “tell me about a time…”.
  • A certification targetSee the role path for which exam to book next.
  • A place in our networkFinish the plan, share the repo, and apply — we mentor and place engineers who complete it.

Finished the plan? Show us.

Share your repo and notes; completed plans get a technical conversation with our architects and first paid tasks through the engineer network.

Apply to the networkPractice interview questions