Yesterday saw the release of Proxmox 1.4 which is the first stable release featuring iSCSI, NFS, LVM, DRBD storage replication in active/active mode and live migration for KVM. Proxmox VE is a very light-weight Debian-based distribution that includes a kernel with support for both KVM and OpenVZ. Proxmox seems to be developing at a steady pace and building a strong community. The storage features included in this latest release are features that KVM users will find very useful for disaster recovery applications.

One of the things I find very interesting about proxmox is that it doesn’t actually use libvirt as a management interface but instead uses the perl scripting language. The maintainers decided to go this route for more rapid development than the C based libvirt. This is a big departure from most of the other KVM third party management tools being developed. There’s a nice interview with Martin Maurer, the maintainer of proxmox that you can read here.

The Official Release notes for this latest release is shown below.

• First release with new storage model
• iSCSI support
• NFS support
• LVM (managed storage, shared LVM devices like FC)
• DRBD storage replication with active/active mode
• Multiple ISO storages (NFS)
• Multiple backup locactions (including NFS)
• Zero downtime live migration (KVM); over ssh channel - all traffic is encrypted
• Updated web interface (pve-manager)
• Support new storage model
• Allow to specify MAC address (for KVM and OpenVZ in veth mode)
• Added iSCSI Tape support, see http://scst.sourceforge.net/
• Added SCST modules to the kernel
• Provide SCST userspace package
• Updated kernel; update broadcom bnx2 and tg3 drivers; updated ARCEA RAID (acrmsr) drivers; updated kvm modules (2.6.30.1); update realtek network drivers; update intel igb driver (igb-1.3.28.4.tar.gz); update intel e1000e driver (e1000e-1.0.2.5.tar.gz); cciss driver updates; ich10 updates for Nehalem (corei7) based systems
• Updated kvm modules (2.6.30.1)
• Update DRBD to 8.3.2
• New KVM userspace tools
• New feature: assign Sockets/Cores to KVM guests
• We now use the qemu-kvm stable branch (0.11.0)
• Rename package pve-kvm to pve-qemu-kvm
• Qemu-server updates
• Support up to 1000 vlans
• New migrate_speed and migrate_downtime settings
• New VZDump - complete rewrite to support the new storage architecture; do not waste space in 'stop' mode
• Slightly changed naming of backup files; added date and time to file name; added VM type (Openvz/Qemu) to file name; new plugin architecture; support hook scripts

For more information on this latest release , see this forum post.

You can download this latest release of proxmox at the following link.

http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Downloads