Proxmox VE 6.4 available

[martin]

We are proud to announce the general availability of Proxmox Virtual Environment 6.4, our open-source virtualization platform. This version brings unified single-file restore for virtual machine (VM) and container (CT) backup archives stored on a Proxmox Backup Server as well as live restore of VM backup archives located on a Proxmox Backup Server.

Version 6.4 also comes with Ceph Octopus 15.2.11 and Ceph Nautilus 14.2.20, many enhancements to KVM/QEMU, and notable bug fixes. Many new Ceph-specific management features have been added to the GUI. We have improved the integration of the placement group (PG) auto-scaler, and you can configure Target Size or Target Ratio settings in the GUI.

The new version is based on Debian Buster 10.9, but using a newer, long-term supported Linux kernel 5.4. Optionally, the 5.11 kernel can be installed, providing support for the latest hardware. The latest versions of QEMU 5.2, LXC 4.0, and OpenZFS 2.0.4 have been included.

There are some notable bug fixes and smaller improvements, see the full release notes.

Release notes
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Roadmap

Press release
https://www.proxmox.com/en/news/press-releases/proxmox-virtual-environment-6-4-available

Video tutorial
https://www.proxmox.com/en/training/video-tutorials/item/what-s-new-in-proxmox-ve-6-4

Download
https://www.proxmox.com/en/downloads
Alternate ISO download:
http://download.proxmox.com/iso

Documentation
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs

Community Forum
https://forum.proxmox.com

Source Code
https://git.proxmox.com

Bugtracker
https://bugzilla.proxmox.com

FAQ
Q: Can I dist-upgrade Proxmox VE 6.x to 6.4 with apt?
A: Yes, just via GUI or via CLI with apt update && apt dist-upgrade

Q: Can I install Proxmox VE 6.4 on top of Debian Buster?
A: Yes, see https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_Buster

Q: Can I upgrade my Proxmox VE 5.4 cluster with Ceph Luminous to 6.x and higher with Ceph Nautilus and even Ceph Octopus?
A: This is a three step process. First, you have to upgrade Proxmox VE from 5.4 to 6.4, and afterwards upgrade Ceph from Luminous to Nautilus. There are a lot of improvements and changes, please follow exactly the upgrade documentation.
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Upgrade_from_5.x_to_6.0
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Ceph_Luminous_to_Nautilus

Finally, do the upgrade to Ceph Octopus - https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Ceph_Nautilus_to_Octopus

Q: Where can I get more information about feature updates?
A: Check our roadmap, forum, mailing lists, and subscribe to our newsletter.

A big THANK YOU to our active community for all your feedback, testing, bug reporting and patch submitting!

__________________
Best regards,

Martin Maurer
Proxmox VE project leader

 

[harvie]

Thank you for great work guys, really hope you will keep going on!

Changelog mentions "Improved cgroup v2 (control group) handling.". Can i ask what exactly was improved? Would it be safe to start phasing this to the production servers now?

 

[t.lamprecht]

Can i ask what exactly was improved?

Things like handling CT freeze/thaw correctly for both versions (relevant for backups and snapshots) and other such fixes where some smaller details were not fully correct for v2.

Would it be safe to start phasing this to the production servers now?

While the cgroupv2 support should be pretty much complete, I'd always first test it for your workload before deploying in production.
Further, I'd recommend waiting for the next major release where the updated base-line kernel and systemd version guarantees can be leveraged to further improve and possibly even default to v2. But that is probably something for another thread.

 

[Taylan]

How can I opt-in for kernel 5.11 while upgrading from pve 6.3?

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

How can I opt-in for kernel 5.11 while upgrading from pve 6.3?

after applying all updates - install the `pve-kernel-5.11` meta-package.

 

[t.lamprecht]

How can I opt-in for kernel 5.11 while upgrading from pve 6.3?

apt install pve-kernel-5.11

 

[ayozeve]

Awesome!! Thanks a lot for all

 

[tuxis]

Hi!

Thanks for this very cool new upgrade, especially the backup features come in very handy! I tested both file-restore-from-gui and live-restore. Both work, however I cannot get files from a Linux machine that uses LVM, (Proxmox Mail Gateway in this case). Are you planning on supporting that? Windows restore works great BTW, very happy that we can also download a complete directory using a ZIP-archive.

 

[timdonovan]

Congrats! I moan a lot here (especially around documentation!) but the reality is you are doing amazing work and I've learnt so much playing around in a homelab. Thank you!

 

[Stefan_R]

Hi!

Thanks for this very cool new upgrade, especially the backup features come in very handy! I tested both file-restore-from-gui and live-restore. Both work, however I cannot get files from a Linux machine that uses LVM, (Proxmox Mail Gateway in this case). Are you planning on supporting that? Windows restore works great BTW, very happy that we can also download a complete directory using a ZIP-archive.

At the moment only filesystems directly on partitions are supported, but we plan on supporting common setups like LVM, ZFS and mdraid in the future.

 

[Alexandre Aguirre]

Good Morning !

First of all, I would like to leave my thanks for the fantastic evolution that Proxmox has been making day after day, and I would like to know if this is in the plans for improvement of the solution, the FT (Fault Tolerance) feature, I believe it would be fantastic for you to have zero fault tolerance. . Thank you in advance for your attention.

 

[danielb]

At the moment only filesystems directly on partitions are supported, but we plan on supporting common setups like LVM, ZFS and mdraid in the future.

I couldn't get it to list files on XFS filesystems, on plain partitions.
One thing which would be nice to see supported is filesystem without any partition. I often attach a dedicated data disk to my VM, format directly /dev/sdb without creating any partition or LVM, and then mount it where I want. Bonus of doing it this way : it's very easy to enlarge later. Just enlarge the disk, then the FS (with resize2fs /dev/sdb, or xfs_growfs /dev/sdb). No need to mess with partition resizing anymore !

 

[t.lamprecht]

First of all, I would like to leave my thanks for the fantastic evolution that Proxmox has been making day after day, and I would like to know if this is in the plans for improvement of the solution, the FT (Fault Tolerance) feature, I believe it would be fantastic for you to have zero fault tolerance. . Thank you in advance for your attention.

There's some effort in the QEMU space, named COLO. It is still under heavy development and has still several drawbacks, IIRC shared storage is not yet supported. Naturally, as this is a realtime live mirror of the running VM you'll some fast setups and networks, to not limit or even hang the VM too much by back-pressure of mirroring memory.

In any way, once the bigger drawbacks are solved we will look into this, but I do not think this is a solution to apply for a broad range of VMs, as it will be quite expensive, so probably only something for highly critical VMs where an outage of even just a few seconds means losses in several thousands of €/$, as else the HA stack can already do recovery.

 

[nick793]

Thanks so much for constantly developing and improving this system!

I had a quick question regarding ZFS 2.0.4 which is now default. I upgraded using apt update && apt dist-upgrade but my root pool now flags that it can be upgraded. Am I able to run a zpool upgrade on the root pool or are there additional steps that I should take?

 

[Alexandre Aguirre]

There's some effort in the QEMU space, named COLO. It is still under heavy development and has still several drawbacks, IIRC shared storage is not yet supported. Naturally, as this is a realtime live mirror of the running VM you'll some fast setups and networks, to not limit or even hang the VM too much by back-pressure of mirroring memory.

In any way, once the bigger drawbacks are solved we will look into this, but I do not think this is a solution to apply for a broad range of VMs, as it will be quite expensive, so probably only something for highly critical VMs where an outage of even just a few seconds means losses in several thousands of €/$, as else the HA stack can already do recovery.

Thank you very much for your feedback!

Very enlightening ......... I will still hope that in the near future we can have FT on Proxmox, because there I will be able to migrate some critical environments that I have on top of VMware to pve

Att.

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

but my root pool now flags that it can be upgraded.

on the root pool or are there additional steps that I should take?

This depends on how your system is booted - see the section on bootloaders in our reference-documentation:
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-sysadmin.html#sysboot

if your system is booted using grub (without `proxmox-boot-tool` handling the copying of the kernels to the vfat-partitions) - then upgrading the pool can render the system unbootable.

if the documentation does not describe the situation in enough detail - please open a new thread with your findings

 

[nick793]

This depends on how your system is booted - see the section on bootloaders in our reference-documentation:
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-sysadmin.html#sysboot

if your system is booted using grub (without `proxmox-boot-tool` handling the copying of the kernels to the vfat-partitions) - then upgrading the pool can render the system unbootable.

if the documentation does not describe the situation in enough detail - please open a new thread with your findings

Gotcha, this makes sense. I've seen grub has potential issues with ZFS features before. Ubuntu gets around this by enabling only certain feature-sets on root, but I don't know the specifics.

My system is using grub, so I will hold off on upgrading the root pool for now. Thanks!

 

[Tokamak]

I've installed proxmox 6.3 from scratch theses days. An apt update && apt dist-upgrade does not do anything.
An apt install proxmox-ve finally says

proxmox-ve is already the newest version (6.3-1).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

What is wrong?

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

What is wrong?

on a hunch - you did not configure the correct repositories - see https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#sysadmin_package_repositories

 

[m!ka]

you can detail how is the single-file restore (for KVM) ?