What’s new in Proxmox VE 5.4

by Davoud Teimouri · 12/04/2019

Proxmox is one of most popular open-source platform for enterprise virtualization. Latest version (5.4) has been released yesterday. The new version is including new features, improvements and fixes.

On This Post:

New Features in Proxmox VE 5.4

Proxmox VE 5.4 introduces new features:

Debian Stretch 9.8 and Linux Kernel 4.15.
New installation wizard for Ceph in the UI,
New HA policies freeze/fail-over/default for greater flexibility,
Suspend to disk/Hibernation support for Qemu guests,
Support for Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) authentication,
Improved ISO installation wizard,
New options for Qemu guest creation wizard

Key Features in Detail

First of all, Ceph can now be installed via the GUI, thus closing the gap of needing the CLI for this initial step, before configuring a complete (hyperconverged) Ceph setup via PVE’s GUI.

It is now possible to set a datacenter wide HA policy which can change the way guests are treated upon a Node shutdown or reboot. The choices are:

freeze: always freeze servivces, independent of the shutdown type (reboot, poweroff)
failover: never freeze services, this means that a service will get recovered to another node if possible and also if the current node does not comes back up in the grace period of 1 minute.
default: this is the current behavior, freeze on reboot but do not freeze on poweroff

qemu guests can be ‘hibernated’ (have their RAM contents and internal state saved to permanent storage) and resumed on the next start. This enables users to preserve the running state of the qemu-guests across most upgrades to and reboots of the PVE-node.

Also it can speed up the startup of guests running complex workloads/ workloads which take lots of resources to setup initially, but which need not run permanently.