Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH today announced the availability of Proxmox VE 5.4, the newest release of its open-source platform for enterprise virtualization. Built on Debian 9.8 (“Stretch”) and a specially modified Linux Kernel 4.15, the Proxmox VE 5.4 introduces a new wizard for installing Ceph storage via the user interface, and brings enhanced flexibility with HA clustering, hibernation support for virtual machines, and support for Universal Second Factor (U2F) authentication.

The new features of Proxmox VE 5.4 focus on usability and simple management of the software-defined infrastructure as well as on security management:

Installing Ceph via user interface with the new wizard – Integrated into the Proxmox VE software stack since 2014 the distributed storage technology Ceph comes with own packages and support from the Proxmox team. The configuration of a Ceph cluster has already been available via the web interface, now with Proxmox VE 5.4 the developers have brought the installation of Ceph from the command line to the user interface making it extremely fast and easy to setup and configure a hyper-converged Proxmox VE/Ceph cluster. Additionally, enterprise on a budget can use commodity off-the-shelf hardware allowing them to cut costs for their growing data storage demands.
Greater Flexibility with High Availability improvements – Proxmox VE 5.4 provides new options to set the HA policy data center-wide, changing the way how guests are treated upon a node shutdown or reboot. This brings greater flexibility and choice to the user. The policy choices are:
- Freeze: always freeze services—independently of the shutdown type (reboot, poweroff).
- Fail-over: never freeze services—this means a service will get recovered to another node if possible and if the current node doesn’t come back up in the grace period of one minute.
- Default: this is the current behavior—freeze on reboot but do not freeze on poweroff.
Suspend to disk/hibernation support for Qemu/KVM guests – With Proxmox VE 5.4 users can hibernate Qemu guests independent of the guest OS and have them resumed properly on the next restart. Hibernation saves the RAM contents and the internal state to permanent storage. This allows users to preserve the running state of their qemu-guests across most upgrades to and reboots of the PVE-node. Additionally it can speed up the startup of guests running complex workloads, and also workloads which need lots of resources at initial setup, but free them later on.
Security: Support for U2F Authentication – Proxmox VE 5.4 supports the U2F (Universal 2nd Factor) protocol which can be used in the web-based user interface as an additional method of two-step verification for users. The U2F is an open authentication standard and simplifies the two-factor authentication. Since it is required in certain domains and environments this is an important improvement to security practices. The new U2F authentication and the TOTP second factor authentication can be configured by each user by themselves without needing a ‘User.Modify’- permission.
Improved ISO installation wizard – The Proxmox VE ISO installation wizard has been optimized offering the ability to go back to a previous screen during the installation. Users can adapt their choices made, without the need to restart the complete installation process. Before the actual installation, a summary page will be displayed containing all relevant information.
Improved Qemu Guest creation wizard - As often requested by the Proxmox community some options like for example Machine-type (q35, pc-i440fx), Firmware (Seabios, UEFI), or SCSI controller can now be selected directly in the VM creation wizard, and dependent options get set to sensible values directly.
By using Proxmox VE 5.4 as an open-source alternative to proprietary virtualization management solutions, enterprises are able to centralize and modernize their infrastructure and turn it into a future-proof software-defined data center.