After a short beta test phase, the developers at Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH release version 8.0 of the Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE). Proxmox VE is based on GNU/Linux and allows Linux containers and any virtual machines to be operated simultaneously under a central web interface, either solo or in a HA cluster.
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Proxmox VE 8.0 is based on the new major release Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm”. The Linux kernel 6.2, which was still optional in Proxmox 7.4, is now installed by default. Resource-efficient Linux containers are now available in LXC 5.0.2. Full virtual machines are available via KVM/QEMU 8.0. ZFS 2.1.11 is used as the file system, distributed storage solutions are implemented with Ceph Quincy 17.2.6. Unlike before, Proxmox VE 8.0 no longer offers older Ceph versions as an alternative – Ceph Octopus or even Pacific are no longer supported. The Ceph client from the Proxmox repository is configured to always receive updates even when not in use.
The freely downloadable Proxmox VE 8.0 installation ISO image contains an updated BusyBox version 1.36.1 and a new text mode written in Rust using the Cursive TUI (Text User Interface). This can be used to work around problems with the graphics mode on special or new hardware. As usual, there is a script for upgrading from Proxmox VE 7.x to 8.0, in this case it is called pve7to8. It checks if there are any discrepancies with the old configuration.
Linux containers and virtual machines
Linux containers (LXC) handle the /etc/machine-id a little differently when cloning. The maximum available memory area of a container is minimally limited (99.6 percent) via the cgroups, so that the container has a chance to clean up its memory before the system terminates it with an out-of-memory error (OOM). The FUSE file system for Linux containers (lxfs), which makes containers look a little more like a virtual machine (/proc/… directories), is now based on FUSE version 3.
The new version of KVM/QEMU 8.0 brings some changes, which can be found in detail in the release notification. Problems with existing VMs under Proxmox VE 8.0 could occur if old VMs e.g -chardev tty or -chardev parport to be used. Some VMs can only be cloned or restored as root@pam if they use PCI/USB PassedThrough. As with Linux containers, when VMs are migrated, the entire storage is no longer searched for orphaned volumes, but only those referenced in the current configuration and in snapshots. This avoids errors where unavailable local storage causes migration to fail even though there is no volume referenced to it.
HA and cluster management
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In addition to many improvements in the web GUI, some small problems with the HA manager in maintenance mode have been fixed. In the terminal (CLI), for example, it is now checked in advance whether an addressed HA node even exists. The changed rsync syntax in Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm” made it necessary to make some adjustments in the cluster synchronization.
All other improvements and changes, but also possible problems that may arise when switching from Proxmox VE 7.x to 8.0 clean in the roadmap documented. The Proxmox Virtual Environment 8.0 is available as open source software available for download now ready and can be used free of charge. Access to the Enterprise Repository is available from 105 euros (net) per year, professional support costs between 325 and 980 euros (net) per year. All prices are per CPU socket.
(fo)