What is new in Proxmox VE 5.4? is it worth upgrading?

New Wizard for Installing Ceph (even easier)

Ceph has been integrated into the Proxmox VE since 2014 as its primary distributed storage technology. The configuration of Ceph has been available in Proxmox VE GUI for a while, but some configuration are still required to be done from command line interface. Proxmox VE 5.4 eliminates all command line requirements and make Ceph fully configurable from Proxmox VE web based GUI. For those of you who are not familiar with Ceph, it is very robust and stable distributed storage architecture which allows you to add cheap and scable storage using cheap disk from multiple nodes within your Proxmox cluster.

Better HA (High Availability) features

Proxmox VE 5.4 improved on 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.
These new HA 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.

Qemu/KVM guests can now Suspend to disk/hibernation

You can now hibernate Qemu guests independent of the guest OS and have them resumed properly on the next restart. Hibernating your virtual machine saves the RAM contents and the internal state to disk. This allows users to restore the running state of their qemu-guests between upgrades to and reboots of the PVE-node.

Support for U2F (Universal 2nd Factor) Authentication (optional)

Proxmox VE 5.4 now 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.

Move options and features in QEMU Guest creation wizard

As often requested by the Proxmox community some options like for example:
- Machine-type (q35, pc-i440fx)
- Firmware (Seabios, UEFI)
- SCSI controller can now be selected directly in the VM creation wizard