Almost five months after its previous 8.3 release, Proxmox, a powerful, free, open-source virtualization platform with over 1.5 million installed hosts worldwide, unveiled its latest version, Proxmox Virtual Environment 8.4.
One of the most notable highlights of this new version is the introduction of live migration with mediated devices. Mediated devices, such as the NVIDIA vGPU, can now be seamlessly transferred between nodes within a cluster while the virtual machines remain active.
However, successful live migration depends on both hardware and driver support being available on the target node. The new pve-nvidia-vgpu-helper tool is designed to simplify the configuration of NVIDIA vGPU drivers, reducing administrator setup complexity.
Another key addition is an API that facilitates plugin development by external backup solution providers. This development allows third-party solutions to integrate their backup and restore functionalities directly into Proxmox VE, taking advantage of Proxmox’s native features.
To further optimize performance and resource utilization, Proxmox VE 8.4 offers virtiofs directory passthrough. This feature lets users share specific files or directories between hosts and virtual machines. Because virtiofs bypasses any need for a network file system, guests can access host files and directories with minimal overhead.
Modern Linux guests benefit from built-in virtiofs support, whereas Windows guests simply require a small installation of additional software.
Under the hood, the new Proxmox VE 8.4 runs the latest Debian 12.10 (Bookworm) and uses Linux kernel 6.8 as the stable default while offering v6.14 as an opt-in alternative for users who want the latest support.
Administrators will also find updated versions of key virtualization and storage technologies, including QEMU 9.2, LXC 6.0, ZFS 2.2.7 (with compatibility patches for the 6.14 kernel), and Ceph Squid 19.2.1.
In addition to these headline features, Proxmox VE 8.4 offers more robust backup “fleecing,” improvements to its software-defined networking stack, and a broader range of configuration options in its ISO installer.
Check out the announcement or full changelog for the complete list of changes.
Proxmox Virtual Environment 8.4 is available for download at Proxmox’s official site. The ISO includes the complete feature set and is ready for installation on bare-metal servers. Distribution upgrades from older versions are supported, making the transition to the new release straightforward for existing users.
