Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH, the company developing the server virtualization platform Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), today announced the general availability of version 4.2. The open source virtualization platform Proxmox VE is a hyper-converged solution enabling users to create and manage LXC containers and KVM virtual machines on the same host, and makes it easy to set up highly available clusters, as well as to manage network and storage via an integrated web-based management interface.

The new Sencha Ext JS 6 framework brings a modern 'flat design' look and feel to the Proxmox VE GUI with a reworked icon set providing consistency and an optimal user experience. In the 'Summary View' data information is now visualized in graphs which gives the user an overview of all his performance data. Browser variations are handled automatically so that the charts always display correctly. The graphs provide enhanced interactive features such as click zoom. With the new Ext JS framework more settings moved from the command line to the GUI such as LXC mount point options or syslog date filtering. Translations for French, German, Italian, and Norwegian were updated within the new GUI, which is translated into 19 languages in total.

New LVM-thin and ZFS improvements help increase storage utilization
Proxmox VE is a bare-metal ISO installer, based on latest Debian Jessie 8.4 combined with a long term Linux 4.4 kernel, based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus). With Proxmox VE 4.2 logical volumes can now be thin provisioned and therefore the Proxmox bare-metal ISO installer offers LVM-thin or ZFS with just one click. A storage administrator can dedicate more capacity to virtual machines than they have and create logical volumes that are larger than the available extents. This ability offers great flexibility and can be expanded dynamically when needed and can help avoiding the need to purchase additional storage because of unused, over-allocated storage.

Another new feature is that ZFS storage can now be selected during the installation process. If the admin chooses ZFS, the ZFS-Plugin will be automatically configured out-of-the-box and the user does not have to re-configure it later.

New SSL certificates with “Let's Encrypt”
Proxmox VE 4.2 now works with the free web server certificates from “Let’s Encrypt”. “Let’s Encrypt” is a free, automated, and open certificate authority providing free SSL certificates with short expiry and automated renewal. This significantly simplifies the process of getting and maintaining a certificate for secure websites with simple commands. The objective of “Let’s Encrypt” and the ACME protocol is to make it possible to set up an HTTPS server and have it automatically obtain a browser-trusted certificate, without any human intervention. This is accomplished by running a certificate management agent on the web server.

Availability

Proxmox VE 4.2 is available now and ready for download at http://www.proxmox.com/downloads Proxmox VE is licensed under the free software license GNU Affero GPL, v3. For companies, Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH offers commercial support subscriptions starting at EUR 64,90 per year and CPU.