Proxmox VE 8.2 Is Out with New Updates

Proxmox VE 8.2 is out. This release feels a bit more like a maintenance release rather than bringing a huge number of features to the mix. Still, this is the first big “dot” release since Proxmox VE 8.1 in November 2023, making it notable.

Proxmox VE 8.2 Is Out with New Updates

To us, the big new features are the new migration capabilities as well as the unattended installation feature. We covered New VMware ESXi to Proxmox VE Import Wizard Available a few weeks ago. That seems part of a more extensive framework to help bring more VMs onto the Proxmox VE ecosystem. This is wise given what we reported in VMware VCSP Customers Seeing 10x or More Cost Increases Under Broadcom.

Here are the key highlights from the Proxmox VE team:

• New import wizard to migrate guests directly from other hypervisors.

  Connect to other hypervisors using their public APIs and directly migrate guests to Proxmox VE.

  First implementation is for VMware ESXi.

  Guests can be started on Proxmox VE while their data is still being imported to the target storage in the background.

• Support for automated and unattended installation of Proxmox VE.

  Proxmox VE now ships a tool that prepares a Proxmox VE ISO for automated installation.

  The prepared ISO retrieves all required settings for automated installation from an answer file.

  The answer file can be provided directly in the ISO, on an additional disk such as a USB flash drive, or over the network.

• Backup fleecing (advanced feature).

  When creating a backup of a running VM, a slow backup target can negatively impact guest IO during the backup process.

  Fleecing can reduce this impact by using fast local storage as a buffer for data blocks.

  However, the fleecing approach requires the use of temporary local storage space.

  Backup fleecing can make sense when backing up IO-heavy guests to a remote Proxmox Backup Server with a slow network connection.

• Modernized Proxmox VE firewall implementation based on nftables (opt-in technology preview).

  The new implementation is written in Rust and intended to replace the current firewall based on iptables in the future.

  Moving to nftables will improve robustness and make it possible to fix long-standing issues with the old implementation.

  The nftables firewall is provided as a technology preview to gather feedback from the community and needs to be enabled manually.

  With a few exceptions, its feature set is nearly on par with the old firewall implementation. (Source: Proxmox)

Beyond those, we also saw a bugfix for an annoying one we have run into a few times over the last quarter or two in the STH lab where the installer would hang at country detection.

Most of these are under-the-hood upgrades for the virtualization and container platform.

Final Words

We were hoping that the SDN feature released in Proxmox VE 8.1 would be out of tech preview, but it seems like that may still take some time. If you see in our cover image, one of the nodes we upgraded today is already at Proxmox VE 8.2.2. Usually, we wait a few days for the release to stabilize before upgrading.

For those wondering about Proxmox VE 9.0, we have no idea when that might come out. At the same time, since Proxmox VE 4 in 2015 we have seen four major dot releases before a new version. If that holds again this time, we would expect Proxmox VE 8.3, Proxmox VE 8.4, then Proxmox VE 9.0 versions making it about a year and a half until PVE 9 under that cadence.