# Overview

In many situations, organizations deploy virtual machines in proxy restricted environments for things such as PCI Compliance, or just general security. As a result of this VM Essentials provides out of the box support for proxy connectivity. Proxy authentication support is also provided with both Basic Authentication capabilities as well as NTLM for Windows Proxy environments. VM Essentials is even able to configure virtual machines it provisions to utilize these proxies by setting up the operating systems proxy settings directly (restricted to cloud-init based Linux platforms for now, but can also be done on windows based platforms in a different manner).

To get started with Proxies, it may first be important to configure the VM Essentials appliance itself to have access to proxy communication for downloading service catalog images. To configure this, visit the Administration > Settings page where a section labeled “Proxy Settings” is located. Fill in the relevant connection info needed to utilize the proxy. It may also be advised to ensure that the Linux environment’s `http_proxy`, `https_proxy`, and no\_proxy are set appropriately.
