What you need to know about Proxmox VE 5.2

On May 16, 2018 the proxmox ve team in Vienna just released their newest Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) version 5.2.  Coincidentally a month after their 10th anniversary in April 2018.  Happy birthday proxmox ve!  I love this software!

Here are the most important points you need to know about Proxmox VE 5.2:

Cloud-Init

Proxmox VE 5.2 now includes cloud-init built in!  Cloud-init is a software package to help automating and setting up of virtual machines.

Cloud-init features includes:

• Deploy VM based on templates
• Pre configure host names, SSH keys, mount points
• Run post install scripts
• Enables automation tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and Salt
• Access to pre-installed disk images and copy servers from pre-created server images

Best of all, all of the above features are now available in Proxmox VE 5.2' graphical user interface (web based GUI). Just awesome!  Thanks Proxmox Team!

SMB/CIFS Storage Plug-in

One of the strength of Proxmox VE is the fact that it comes pre-installed with many useful storage plug-ins such as Local directory, NFS, Ceph.  SMB/CIFS has been missing until now.  SMB obviously is very important and popular because it is the default file sharing protocol preferred by Windows / Microsoft.  It is also known to be faster and lighter on the data communication compared to NFS.  This addition of SMB/CIFS storage support to Proxmox VE 5.2 is definitely a huge improvement!

Let's Encrypt Certificate Management via GUI

Are you tired of seeing that warning message above?  Or having to spent the extra 5 seconds to make exception to allow yourself to see your own server? Yeah, me too!

Thanks to Proxmox VE 5.2, in the future setting up SSL on your Proxmox VE hardware nodes will be a breeze thanks to the built in GUI support to install Let's Encrypt SSL certificate.

In case you are not aware... Let's Encrypt SSL project allows anyone to get a FREE SSL certificate for any purpose (such as protecting your Proxmox VE server).

I have created a short video - How to get your own Free Let's Encrypt Certificate in less than 5 min:

Added features in Proxmox VE 5.2:

• Creation of clusters via the graphical user interface. This feature makes creating and joining nodes to a Proxmox cluster extremely simple and intuitive even for novice users.
• Expanded functionality of LXC: Creating templates or moving disks from one storage to another now also work for LXC. The move-disk function can be used for stopped/paused containers and instead of backup/restore.
• If the QEMU guest agent is installed, the IP address of a virtual machine is displayed on the GUI
• Administrators can now easily create and edit new roles via the GUI.
• Setting I/O limits for restore operations is possible (globally or more fine-grained per storage) to avoid I/O load getting too high while restoring a backup.
• Configuration of ebtables in the Proxmox VE Firewall.

I just want to once again say Thank You to the Proxmox VE team for making such a great software!