Virtualization: Proxmox Virtual Environment 6.4 in a short test

Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH has renewed all three parts of its hypervisor and container platform. Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) 6.4, Mail Gateway 6.4 and Backup Server 1.1 are now based on Debian GNU / Linux 10.9 Buster. Proxmox VE (download) uses a kernel 5.4 LTS or optionally 5.11 and provides VMs from a combination of QEMU 5.2 and KVM. Recently, VMs can be pinned to certain QEMU machine versions. Windows VMs are automatically linked to the version of the current QEMU machine when they are created. LXC 4.0 containers allow improved cgroup v2 handling. Application templates are available for Alpine Linux 3.13, Fedora 34, Ubuntu 21.04 and the Devuan 3 Beowulf, which has been freed from systemd.

The Proxmox cluster can use Ceph in two versions as highly available, distributed storage. During the installation you can choose between Ceph Nautilus 14.2.20 and Octopus 15.2.11 in the configuration wizard. Ceph Octopus is to be preferred especially for multi-site installations. Among other things, the integration of the Placement Group Auto-Scaler has been improved in Proxmox VE 6.4.

With Proxmox VE 6.4, OpenZFS 2.0.4 replaces ZFS 0.8.5. OpenZFS 2.0 brings together the parallel ZFS developments from FreeBSD, Linux and Illumos. Many improvements and the compression with the Zstandard (zstd) developed by Facebook make the use of OpenZFS 2.0.4 attractive. Zstd is completely multithreaded and especially fast when it comes to decompression. It combines a dictionary matching stage with a large search window with fast finite-state entropy coding, which includes both Huffman coding and tANS (Tabled Asymmetric Numeral Systems).