This is a very important blog, and this is the foundation of getting the configuration correct.
When I initially tried this on 24.04 there was a utility called hpe-vm through which we could configure networking but in 9.1 HVM OS 26.04, hpe-vm has been replaced by hvmcli which now follows an ESX like command syntax.
As of this writing there still doesn’t seem to be any web client for HVM hosts post install so it looks the only UI is via the Morpheus manager post cluster join.
Check the NICs are the same on every host first. The cluster needs identical interface names
for h in 71 72 73; do echo "== 172.16.11.$h"; ssh hvmadmin@172.16.11.$h hvmcli interfaces list --filter ethernet; done
Guest NIC mapped to its MAC
On the HVM node, we can run commands that will show this information
hvmcli virtswitch list
That’s all we need to do for the base configuration so very simple just 8 NIC’s and just the management interface in UP, rest is down. All the other configuration is done via the VM Essentials Manager or Morpheus UI
Configuring TimeSync on HVM host via Chrony
Before building the cluster, every host needs the same time. In this lab, the Proxmox host is our NTP server. If you need to build one, I’ve covered setting up a chrony NTP server in my chrony post.
Install and Configure Chrony NTP Server on Ubuntu
The HVM ISO runs chrony, not timesyncd and our Proxmox already runs chrony, so we just allow the lab subnets to query it.
Remove the default Ubuntu internet pools (comments out the “pool” lines)
sudo sed -i ‘s/^pool /#pool /’ /etc/chrony/chrony.conf
I will just all my whole subnet to pass through
echo “server 172.16.11.1 iburst prefer” | sudo tee /etc/chrony/sources.d/lab.sources
Setting timezone to London
sudo timedatectl set-timezone Europe/London
Restart chrony
sudo systemctl restart chrony
Run timedatectl to check ntp settings
root@hvm-n3:# timedatectl
Local time: Sat 2026-10-24 20:54:02 BST
Universal time: Sat 2026-10-24 19:54:02 UTC
RTC time: Sat 2026-10-24 19:54:02
Time zone: Europe/London (BST, +0100)
System clock synchronized: yes
NTP service: active
RTC in local TZ: no
root@hvm-n3:#