Software update: Proxmox VE 6.3

Proxmox VE is an open source virtualization platform based on kvm and lxc containers. It can be managed via a web interface, and a commandline and a rest API are also available. For more information, please refer to this page and various video tutorials can be found on this page being watched. The whole is published under the agpl. Version 6.3 has been released with the following changes:

Proxmox VE 6.3

• Based on Debian Buster (10.6)
• Ceph Octopus 15.2.6 (first stable release) and Ceph Nautilus 14.2.15
• Kernel 5.4 LTS
• LXC 4.0
• QEMU 5.1
• ZFS 0.8.5

Proxmox Backup Server Integration

• Stable Proxmox Backup Server integration: The stable version 1.0 of Proxmox Backup Server is now integrated and enterprise support is available from the Proxmox support team.
• Data encrypted on client side before backing up to Proxmox Backup Server.

Cepha

• Stable integration of Ceph Octopus.
• Add selector to choose which supported Ceph version to install in the GUI configuration wizard.
• Recovery progress is displayed in the Ceph status panel.
• Show and allow setting of Placement Group (PG) auto-scaling mode of Ceph pools.
• Set device class when creating OSDs, especially if the auto-detection yields the wrong class.

Enhancements in the GUI

• Improved VM boot order editor:
  • It is now possible to select multiple devices per type (disk, network) for booting.
  • Booting from passed through PCI devices (eg, NVMe drives) is supported.
  • Improved user experience with a drag and drop UI.
• GUI for editing external metric servers: You can now connect your Proxmox VE nodes to InfluxDB or Graphite using the GUI, instead of having to manually edit /etc/pve/status.cfg
• Optional TLS certificate verification for LDAP and AD authentication realms.
• Improve high-DPI display and browser zoom compatibility.
• Split up storage content view by type.
• Backup/Restore:
  • Overview of all guests, which aren’t included in any backup at all.
  • Detailed view per backup job, showing all covered guests and which of their disks are backed up.
• Display optional comments for all storage types.
  • Proxmox Backup Server additionally displays the verification state of all backup snapshots.
• Better usability for preventing accidental snapshot rollback
  • The GUI now makes it difficult to accidentally confuse snapshot removal with snapshot rollback.

Storage

• Add highly flexible backup retention with “keep” settings: The new backup retention settings, which augment and replace the “Max Backups” setting, enable you to decide how many backups to keep per timeframe and implement enhanced retention policies per storage or backup job.
• Better handling of container volume activation on ZFS.
• Increased timeout for connecting to CIFS and NFS storage over slow links.
• Improve querying SSD wear leveling.
• Small improvements to the configuration handling of the LIO iSCSI provider for ZFS over iSCSI storage.
• ZFS disk management: create a systemd service to unconditionally import a pool created using the GUI.

Container

• Add support for current Devuan containers.
• Add support for Kali Linux containers.
• Update list of supported releases for Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS.
• Support setting a custom timezone per container.
• Improve startup monitoring.
• Add a debug parameter to pct start, to output the debug log of the container start.
• Support systems with up to 8192 cores.
• Optionally ignore mount points while running pc fstrim.
• Fix aborting of backups on Ceph backed containers with a large IO load, by issuing fsfreeze before snapshotting.

QEMU

• Fast, incremental backups to Proxmox Backup Server using dirty-bitmaps.
• Handle guest shutdowns (power down from within a VM) during backups.
• Improved boot order selection allowing booting from multiple virtual disks and from passed through PCI devices (eg, NVMe drives).
• Allow pass through of certain older Intel iGPU models with QEMU’s ‘legacy-igd’ mode.
• Support more CPU options, for example SSE4.2
• Better support for hugepages across multiple NUMA nodes.

General improvements for virtual guests

• Improved handling of replicated guests when migrating.

Clustering

• Harden locking in the clustered configuration filesystem (pmxcfs), avoids a possible freeze when joining, messaging or leaving a closed-process-group.

User and permission management

• Improved support for using client certificates/keys when connecting to AD/LDAP realms.
• Optional support for case-insensitive logins with AD/LDAP realms.
• Fine-grained permissions for SDN and CloudInit.
• Better handling of clock jumps for rotating keys.

firewall

• Improved API for matching ICMP types.

Documentation

• Clarify qdevice requirements.
• Add section about ZFS pool design choices.
• Add documentation on requirement for encrypted ZFS datasets as storage.
• Add man page for cpu-models.conf(5).

Installer

• Reboot automatically upon successful installation.
• Drop ext3 as supported file system.
• Start a shell on vt3 for debugging during installation.

Experimental: support for Software-Defined Networking (SDN)

• Support for IPAM with a plugin framework.
• Add support for internal IPAM management and PowerDNS.

Known Issues

• VM guests with multiple boot disk setups (eg, mdadm, LVM, etc…) need to be configured with the new boot order config so that all required disks are marked “bootable”, with the one containing the boot loader placed first – otherwise, the guest may fail to boot after being restarted with the new QEMU 5.1 version.
• The “exclude-path” option for vzdump now supports non-anchored paths for all backup modes. Non-anchored paths do not start with a ‘/’ and will match in any subdirectory. Previously, such paths only had an effect for “suspend” mode backups, so please ensure that you don’t have any unwanted non-anchored paths configured.