Main highlight of this update is a modernized core built upon Debian 13 “Trixie”, ensuring a robust foundation for the platform.
Proxmox VE 9.0 further introduces significant advancements in both storage and networking capabilities, addressing critical enterprise demands. A highlight is the long-awaited support for snapshots on thick-provisioned LVM shared storage, improving storage management capabilities especially for enterprise users with Fibre Channel (FC) or iSCSI SAN environments. With newly added “fabric” support for Software-Defined Networking (SDN), administrators can construct highly complex and scalable network architectures.
↫ Proxmox press release
I’ve only very recently accepted the gospel of Proxmox, and I now have a little mini PC running Proxmox, hosting a Debian Pi-Hole container, a 9front virtual machine, and a Windows 7 retro virtual machine. I’m intending to use it as an easy shortcut for running retro stuff, as well as any fun tools I might run into that work best in a container. I haven’t updated yet to this new release, but I’m interested to see how easy the upgrade process will be. Considering it’s just Debian, it can’t be too involved.
I’m curious of anyone else here is using Proxmox or similar tools at home, or at work for more complex use cases.
> I’m curious of anyone else here is using Proxmox or similar tools at home, or at work for more complex use cases.
Having used PVE since v1.x (where the WebGUI looked like HTML written in Notepad), I can say the PVE is truly a breath of fresh air, especially if one has used to battling demons in the the dungeons with tools like VMware ESX/ESXi and the baggage associated with it.
Although I haven’t had the chance to use PVE and PBS in the recent past, I do /try/ to keep myself updated with its feature list.
All-in-all, welcome to the new world! 🙂 🙂
Cheers,
ShAnTANu
Oh yes, mine is running Home Assistant, Immich, Nextcloud, Plex, Jellyfin and tons more stuff. It’s the infrastructure I rely on, have for years now,.and Proxmox doesn’t let me down.
I’m also primarily running Home Assistant, with NextCloud andGitLab on Proxmox. I also have network utils in there like ubiquity network manager to manage my U7 pro AP. All that on a fanless HP t640 thin client I got on ebay for $50 (replaced an overkill, power hungry Dual Xeon server I used to run.) I don’t run core networking or routing on that thought. That’s on a bare metal Intel Atom appliance running opnsense. Proxmox has been lovely to just try out different bits of software. Turnkey Linux often makes that easy.
I also use it and love it…the upgrade process is not that bad – I upgraded from 7 to 8 (and the 8 to 9 instructions seem similar) and they have a useful tool that identifies potential issues, you resolve them, re-run the tool and when all is well, continue with the upgrade process. You should just do it with a monitor/KVM attached instead of SSH in case of boot or networking problems afterwards.
Currently I have 4 VMs in it: one with Home Assistant OS, one with Windows 11 (for certain self-hosted things that are super-easy to run as a Windows service), one with Ubuntu Server (for Nextcloud AIO & other Linux-based self-hosted services) and one Debian dedicated to a Mastodon instance (which has really got to come up with a more reasonable way to install and upgrade, it’s beyond awful using the official guide).
I use PVE everywhere and all the time 🙂
“Homelab” is a triple hetergeneous cluster (i5/n100/celeron I know, too poor to rack servers@home) and it hosts everything HASS/jellyfin/pihole/crosscompilation VMs … even Z2M in a LXC container with USB bindings (and they already got easier late PVE8)
Pro side, since early versions, and some of the clusters I manage have been upgraded since PVE5 or PVE6, smoothly… all are 8.3/8.4 by now, something like 60 nodes in 10 clusters (half a dozen clients) at this point.
Most are CEPH based, and I often divert the use of the CEPHFS to share folders to LXC mountpoints… it allows to have multiple backends with shared files across a large cluster (deep and/or large filesystems aren’t uber snappy though, but any FS would suffer these extreme cases anyways)
What I love with Proxmox: nothing is hidden, they mainly develop the managing core and tools for other opensource projects and glue everything together, and even their stuff remains open… any seasoned/bearded nix sysadmin can audit/understand/fix… rare oddities (seems PVE9 explicitly allows you to disable IPv6 at last!)
I’ve been holding back but I need to dive into that SDN stack one day
<3 Proxmox
Found that for single node hypervisor, using proxmox is bloated: I prefer a distro agnostic solution, cockpit as UI [https://cockpit-project.org] and libvirtd as VM mgmt.
Lightweight, easy to use with any distro, no problem: just install `cockpit-machines` on a freshly installed distro and you’re ready to go (libvirt will arrive as dependency)!
Using this setup i’m also moving away from VMs and starting using directly container for some of my services like pi-hole and jellyfin, using podman integration via `cockpit-podman`, saving resources and reducing the sysadmin efforts.
This looks neat, going to check it out. I do run a mix of VMs (Home Assitant) and LXC containers (everything else) on Proxmox already. But I have a limited amount of RAM on my thin client, so always looking for a way to squeeze more out of it.
@andreamtp
After the upgrade to Proxmox 9, Proxmox was using 2 GB on my system. This was with a half-dozen LXC containers running including PiHole, Twingate, and Immich (but no VMs yet). Not too bad really.
Cockpit is another plank in the Red Hat platform and so of course dependent on systemd. Very interesting that SUSE is moving to it as well though and ditching YaST. I have been meaning to check it out.
I will probably start by installing Cockpit on a Proxmox VM. A nice trial will be seeing how much it helps with OCI container admin (Docker). Looks like I will need cockpit-podman. What you are saying makes sense for a single machine (non-cluster) where Cockpit acts as a friendly GUI over QEMU/libvirt.
One thing that Cockpit stand-alone does not help with is LXC containers which I quite enjoy on Proxmox. There is an LXC container driver for libvirt but I have no experience with it. Or maybe I will find that, using Cockpit, using Docker-style containers for everything is fine. Thank you for the suggestion!
I have used Proxmox on my 2 servers cluster for 5 years and I love it. It just works. It’s simple enough for I, a poor mortal, an amateur sysadmin.
I would probably have liked to use lighter stuff, but I love being able to migrate my VMs from one server to the other.
Yep, another satisfied proxmox user here.
I recently stumbled across proxmenux: a curses ui for all sorts of handy proxmox tools and recipes. All accessible through a terminal! Verrrry nice! 🙂
I run Proxmox at home and cannot imagine working without it. In addition to things like PiHole, Jellyfin, Immich, and the like, I use it extensively for remote desktops. I use Twingate (running on Proxmox of course) to connect to my home network from anywhere.
For remote desktops, I have several Proxmox containers and virtual machines dedicated to certain activities. I have one for hobby dev and one for video transcoding for example. It is great to be able to hop on when I have a few minutes and find things exactly as I left them, make a bit of progress, and then leave things in place for next time. For long-running jobs (hours or days), it is great to be able to connect from multiple machines or locations without stopping the job. One of my Proxmox VMs exists just to compile the Ladybird browser. I often kick of a build of the latest on GitHub in the morning. When I get a few moments, I pop back over to find the latest Ladybird running. I do a lot of my recreational browsing in Ladybird to test it out. If you read my comments here, they are often being left from the Ladybird browser that I built that morning in Proxmox. It is very handy to have a Windows and macOS desktop available on Proxmox as well that I can access from anywhere if I need to.
And of course, Proxmox makes it very easy to quickly install Haiku, or ReactOS, or some new Linux distro just to see how things are shaping up.
Proxmox is awesome.
I just upgraded to Proxmox 9.0.4 so it is running on Debian 13 now (kernel 6.14.8). The upgrade always stresses me out but once again it went off without a hitch. It took less than a half-hour. Interesting that they pushed Trixie to production before Debian did.