Today I want to go over the new features in Proxmox 8 and what I think about them, and also go over a demonstration of upgrading from Proxmox 7 to Proxmox 8. So first of all, let's get started with the new features in Proxmox version 8. First of all, you can now use a text-based installer when installing Proxmox. That way you don't have to have a GUI or a mouse or any of that, and it can help improve compatibility and sometimes I find it just easier and faster to use compared to a GUI installer. The interface is exactly the same as the old GUI-based installer, all the menus are the same, all the interface and boxes and everything are the same, it's just using text interfaces instead of a graphical interface. These next groups of features I'm going to put under the umbrella of permissions improvement. Proxmox had a few issues of permissions that I went over in my previous issue, and luckily Proxmox 8 pretty much fixes all of this. The first thing is how it handles networking. In the previous versions of Proxmox, you couldn't prevent a user from being able to put a VM on the virtual bridge 0 or other virtual bridges on a local host. You could control permissions using the software defined networking in Proxmox, but that wasn't there by default and was still kind of in beta. Now with Proxmox 8, software defined networking is kind of enabled by default. So now software defined networking like interface is being used for your default virtual bridges. So now whenever you use Proxmox, you get this little software defined networking thing by default under your host, and that controls permissions of all the built-in adapters. If you don't want to control permission, it doesn't matter, it won't affect you, but if you do want to control permissions, it was a lot better than it was previously. You still need to install an additional package if you want to use the full software defined networking though. Proxmox has also added support for what they call resource mappings. This allows you to take groups of PCIe devices or USB devices, put them together, put a friendly name on it, and then allow users to be able to pass through those devices to their VMs. Unfortunately you can either give a user access to all of those map devices or none of them. You can't control them granularly and say maybe they can only pass through this SSD, but not a graphics card on this host. But it is a nice way to allow users to manage pass-through of devices without giving them access to everything on the system. The last major permissions improvement feature is now it can do automatic syncs to LDAP or Active Directory user databases. This way it'll automatically sync so you don't have to manually sync every time you update your Active Directory and now want to add that user into Proxmox. Proxmox 8 also changes the default CPU type given to a VM. The CPU type determines which CPU features that a VM can use. By default the previous QEMU64 one didn't have that many features and it means the VM would often have to use an older method which was slower. Now it uses x86_64v2_AES which gives it most notably AES instructions which are much faster than doing it the brute force slower method on CPUs. It might also improve compatibility for some programs which need these instructions. Using the most optimal instruction for your VM, whatever the lowest common denominator of your cluster is or using the host for the best performance, is still the best but this is better if you leave it to the default or forget to change it for one of your VMs. Proxmox 8 also updates a lot of the packages it uses under the hood to new versions. Most notably Debian has been updated from version 11 to version 12 which is now bookworm. This means all the Debian packages have also been improved. One example that I like is the new version of H-TOP which now shows you IO usage. Proxmox also includes the Linux kernel 6.2 by default now instead of it being an optional upgrade to which it was in version 7.4. Some other notable package upgrades include ZFS is now version 2.1.12 and KEMU is version 8. There's also been a lot of other little changes made to Proxmox that you can view on the wiki page. But overall it's a very similar rest to what it was previously and no major UI change has been made. So you can easily do an upgrade from Proxmox 7.4 to version 8 and you don't really notice it that much. There's a few nice little features but overall just works as an iOS which is exactly what I could want. Now let's take a look at your options from upgrading an existing Proxmox 7 system to Proxmox 8. There's two main options here. First is a backup restore and reinstall. This will involve making a backup of all of your VMs and containers on the system, reinstalling Proxmox 8 onto the system and formatting all the drives and then restoring the backups for all of your VMs and containers. This guarantees that there won't be any issues due to in place upgrades or any file upgrades or config file changes because everything will be fresh. But the disadvantage is this can result in more downtime and can take quite a bit of time especially if you have a lot of VMs and containers that you need to restore the backups on. The next way to do it is an in place upgrade. Where you just have the system upgrade itself from Proxmox 7 to Proxmox 8 and I'm going to be doing a demonstration of that now. This process is typically successful, I've done it a few times without any issues but there can be issues and I would plan for being able to do a backup restore and reinstall if something goes really wrong. So let's first take a look at the Proxmox 7 to 8 wiki page. And this is a great little page for going over all the steps and lots of little changes here. I'm going to be demonstrating going over these steps but you should probably read what's going on here especially if you have a weird configuration because it goes over a lot of the different things. And then I have my Proxmox 7 system here that I'm going to be upgrading and I also have a command line logged into this system. The first thing I'm going to do is an apt update and then an apt upgrade. And this will upgrade the system to the latest version of 7.4 and should be done before doing any of these other steps involving Proxmox 8. Doing this also installs the PVE 7 to 8 script which can be ran and checked if there's any compatibility issues or possible problems when upgrading to Proxmox 8. I could run PVE 7 to 8 on this system and it runs a little script that's going to check for any possible issues when upgrading to Proxmox 8. And it's going to take a second or two and show all of these things saying it's passed 23 tests and it doesn't show any warnings or errors. I can scroll up and check for everything that the system checked and typically it'll check for any of the common issues. My system just passed all the tests so I can continue doing the upgrade on the system but I do want to note that this will only check for possible issues and will not fix them. So if it comes with a warning or an error here, look at what's giving you that warning or error and then go find out what that issue is, fix the warning or error and then go back and run this script again. Now that my system has passed all the checks, I can continue with the actual upgrade of the system. The first thing I'm going to have to do is update the package repositories. This will tell the system to ask for the latest version which is the one that Proxmox 8 uses or Debian Bookworm. So the first thing I'm going to do is run this send command and what this will do is it'll look for anything that says "bullseye" the current version and replace it with Bookworm in the slash etc slash apt slash sources dot list file. By default in Proxmox, this has all the Debian packages and repositories. Following this command will update all the Debian files but Proxmox also has its own repositories. By default it will have the pve enterprise list one that will need to be updated here. And following this command does a very similar action where it'll download the latest version of the Proxmox enterprise repository and put it in that file. If you're not using the enterprise repository and using the no subscription or test or other repositories, you need to put the latest version either in one of these repository lists here or in the main sources dot list file. On this system for example, I can check the main sources dot list file and this is where I put my no subscription repository. Make sure you have the no subscription repository enabled if you don't have another Proxmox repository as you'll need that enabled to upgrade to Proxmox 8. In this case I can see I have here the download that Proxmox dot com slash Debian slash pve upgraded to Bookworm and that's my pve no subscription repository. If you're using Ceph on your system you'll also need to upgrade Ceph and you need to upgrade all the Ceph nodes before you upgrade Proxmox. And now that all these package repositories have been updated you can run apt update. Running apt update will tell the system to reach out to all those servers, find out what the latest version of all the packages it can upgrade to is and it'll let you know if there's any upgrades available. And since there's a major version release it says that there's 586 packages that can be upgraded. This process would take less than 10 minutes from me in my experience, seems to download about 550 megabytes of data, but this really depends. Once the download is completed you might get a couple of prompts during the actual upgrade process. You first likely get a change log right here, you can just hit Q to exit and it'll continue doing the upgrade. It's going to ask me for my keyboard layout so I'm just going to hit enter for English. And then it's likely going to ask you about a few more package files if you want to overwrite them with the latest version or if you want to keep your current version. Proxmox on the wiki has a few different ones in saying what you should normally do, but what it wants to say is for etc slash issue which it's asking for me about first is doing no is okay for this one. Other configuration files ask you if you want to change it or get the new version for example. One option I often see is something like samba if I set up a samba server. You likely want to keep the version if you remember changing it with specific details. Otherwise if it's created by a script or you're just using the default version on your system you probably want to let it be overwritten. Double check and actually look at the file yourself if you're not sure. Another prompt I got on the system is if I want to restart any packages without asking and I'm going to say yes because this system isn't running any VMs or anything else important so it can restart whatever it wants during the actual upgrade process. Here it is prompting me about sshd having a new version. sshd is the ssh server so that's what I'm actually logged into right now. I'm going to say install the package maintainers version because I haven't modified that package at all so I might as well have the newer version if anything's changed within the default configuration. And now that my system is rebooted the update is completed. If I take a look at the system I can see it says Proxmox virtual environment 8.3. Everything looks fine. Some of the changes that Proxmox 8 has are showing up on the system as expected. And if I go back into the command line and run pve version it should show me that I'm running Proxmox version 8 on the system right here and it says running kernel 6.2. Everything in this upgrade went smoothly and represents the same experiences I had doing a few other upgrades on systems. Even though Proxmox 8 has been virtually bug free in my testing, I generally recommend that you wait a month or two for a new OS release just to make sure that if there is any bugs, you're not the one doing all the testing. But I think it's a pretty nice feature upgrade that Proxmox has brought. I don't have any issues or complaints with it, and it's been overall nice seeing them add features to the OS nicely, but not redoing the interface or changing anything major I could see them doing in a bad way. Let me know what your thoughts on Proxmox 8 are in the comments below, and if you've tried using it, what your experiences are. Thanks for watching.
