Home Lab

Upgrading Proxmox VE 8 to 9: A Real-World Walkthrough

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I’ll be honest — I’ve been putting this off for a while. Proxmox VE 9 dropped earlier this year, and every time I looked at the upgrade guide I thought “yeah, I’ll get to that.” This weekend I finally ran out of excuses and carved out some time to tackle it. Three nodes, a hyper-converged Ceph cluster, and a handful of HA-managed VMs. Nothing exotic, but enough moving parts to make it interesting. This post is meant to complement the official Proxmox upgrade documentation — not replace it. If you want the authoritative source, go there. What I’m documenting here is what the upgrade actually looked like in practice on a real homelab cluster, including the things pve8to9 flagged and how I resolved them. Why Upgrade to Proxmox VE 9? Before we get into the how, it’s worth covering the why. Proxmox VE 8 remains functional and receives security updates, but PVE 9 brings meaningful improvements across storage, networking, HA, and container management that make the upgrade worth doing — especially if you’re running any production-adjacent workloads. Debian 13 “Trixie” Foundation PVE 9.0 is built on Debian 13 “Trixie”, bringing a newer kernel (6.14.x in 9.0, jumping to 7.0 in 9.2), updated toolchains, and broader hardware support. QEMU jumps from 8.x to 10.x/11.x, LXC to 6.0.4, and ZFS to 2.3.3. If you’re running newer hardware …

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Building an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Cloud-Init Template in Proxmox

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Ubuntu 26.04 LTS dropped last month, and instead of doing what I’d normally do — build a template, snapshot it, and slowly watch it age — I decided it was finally time to actually dig into Cloud-Init. If you’ve built Proxmox templates before, you know the drill: create a VM, install the OS, install your packages, sysprep it, convert it to a template, and then clone it every time you need a new box. It works, but every clone inherits whatever state the template was in the day you built it. Packages drift. You’re manually cleaning up machine IDs and SSH host keys after every clone. Spin up ten VMs for a lab build and you’ve got ten rounds of post-boot cleanup ahead of you. Cloud-Init sidesteps all of that. Instead of a fat, opinionated image, you start with a minimal cloud image — the same kind AWS, Azure, and GCP use under the hood. The image carries no fixed identity. When you clone it and boot it, Proxmox injects your config (username, SSH key, hostname, network settings) via a virtual CD-ROM drive, and Cloud-Init configures the VM from the inside on first boot. Clean machine ID, unique SSH host keys, fully configured — before you even open a terminal. The real unlock is that your config is a YAML file. Want ten identical VMs? …

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