Proxmox Datacenter Manager Just Went GA and It Changes Everything

If you have been following Promxox for the past couple of years now, there is one tool that piqued I think the attention of all of us and that is Proxmox Datacenter Manager. We first got a glimpse of it in alpha, and then beta, but now, the big news is that Proxmox Datacenter Manager 1.0 is here in GA form! I think this has been the missing piece of the puzzle for Proxmox for quite a while now, a centralized management tool that is very “vcenter” like in what it does. Let’s see how Proxmox Datacenter Manager changes everything not only for the home lab but for production environments.

The official news

Proxmox Server Solutions has officially released Proxmox Datacenter Manager 1.0. The idea of a single pane of glass for Proxmox is not new, but this is the first time Proxmox has delivered a purpose-built solution. It allows us to now have a unified metrics dashboard, cross cluster operations, role-based views, central updates, and even cross cluster live migration which is a big one!

Read the official press statement here: Proxmox Datacenter Manager 1.0 available.

What challenge does this solve?

If you have ever managed two or more Proxmox clusters at the same time, you know about the aspects of administrating Proxmox that are painful. Each cluster has its own web UI, its own authentication, its own metrics, and its own update configuration and cycle. If you need to scale this to multiple hosts or even datacenters things get cumbersome and complicated. Proxmox Datacenter Manager 1.0 changes this by giving admins a centralized operations dashboard that gives them visibility across their entire Proxmox estate.

Here are a few of the common issues that Proxmox Datacenter Manager helps to solve:

• Disjointed monitoring with no global view
• Manual and repetitive tasks across clusters
• No standard location to search or audit resources
• Difficulty coordinating updates with multiple hosts/clusters at scale
• No easy way to assign permissions across teams
• No built in cross cluster VM migrations

The release of Proxmox Datacenter Manager is the official GA release that helps customers solve these pain points.

Centralized overview and metrics aggregation

One of the first things that is obviously a game changer is the unified dashboard that connects to multiple Proxmox VE servers. These can be:

• Standalone node
• Full Proxmox VE cluster
• Proxmox Backup Server

From the interface, you can see the overall health of the Proxmox environment in real time. The dashboard shows you things like CPU load, RAM use, storage I/O, and backup server health among other key performance statistics.

Another neat feature is that Proxmox caches recent data locally. With this, you can still see the last known state of clusters even if a remote Proxmox host becomes temporarily unreachable. For multi-site deployments or edge locations with unstable connectivity, I can see this being really beneficial.

Dynamic role-based custom views

For teams of admins that includes admins, junior admins, and others, PDM contains a new permissions model that allows admins to create specialized views of the environment. You can filter these by cluster, host type, tags, or even resource class. So, you can build out custom dashboards to show only what resources specific users need to see.

The key here is that it is role-based access control at a high-level. This means you don’t have to give users access to the underlying infrastructure. This will help with compliance in production environments.

It also gives administrators the ability to design purpose built views like the following:

• A dashboard for backup operators
• A dashboard for capacity planners
• A dashboard for help desk teams
• A dashboard for edge site admins, etc

Again, these are all controlled through one system without exposing the rest of the infrastructure.

Multi-cluster management from the same UI

This is now a huge feature. Admins can connect multiple clusters and multiple Proxmox Backup Servers (PBS) into one control plane tool. Once these are connected, they can perform VM and container life cycle tasks from the same interface.

Features for this include starting and stopping guests, modifying basic settings, and configuring and managing storage resources. Now, you don’t have to jump between the different interfaces of the various Proxmox servers you have in your home lab or production environments.

Cross cluster live migration

A feature I think that will also be a game changer is the ability released in the version 1.0 GA release that enables cross cluster live migration. Until now, there hasn’t been a supported way to live migrate VMs between clusters, only within a single cluster.

Now, with Datacenter Manager, admins can migrate a running virtual machine between clusters with no downtime. So this will change what is possible now for Proxmox infrastructure.

The new feature supports:

• Load balancing across clusters
• Hardware maintenance or even decommissions clusters without downtime
• Migration of workloads between datacenters

I think cross cluster live migration will be one of the features introduced that will allow more enterprise customers to consider Proxmox for larger environments.

Search with a query language that makes sense

There is a new full search engine in the release of Proxmox Datacenter Manager 1.0. This means you can filter across all your clusters and nodes.

You can search by resource type, cluster, running state, or specific tags. This becomes useful in environments with hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines or containers. Trying to find a workload in the traditional Proxmox interface would mean navigating the tree structure in each specific interface. In Datacenter Manager, the search bar is the fastest way to find any resource.

Centralized SDN with EVPN

Back in Proxmox 8.x, it released software-defined networking. Managing SDN across multiple clusters though hasn’t really been easy due to the disaggregated nature of the interface. With Datacenter Manager, it introduces centralized SDN configurations for EVPN zones and VNets. Admins can define overlays and deploy them across many remotes. This will be helpful for orgs to have a standardized network build across multiple datacenters.

Also, if you are building VLAN aware bridges, EVPN overlays, or even more advanced SDN configurations, the centralized management will definitely help prevent a lot of duplicated config efforts, etc.

Central update management

When it comes to having virtualized environments with multiple Proxmox VE server hosts and clusters, keeping these updated has been a very manual task having to update each cluster manually. Datacenter Manager changes that. Now you have a unified updated management panel that shows all updates for all connected Proxmox servers.

Admins can now trigger updates directly from Datacenter Manager and they also have logging for update operations and patches. This will be a great step forward not only for management but also for security operations.

Installing Proxmox Datacenter Manager

Proxmox Datacenter Manager is easily installed by downloading the ISO image from Proxmox and going through the installation process. First, download the ISO image from here:

Here you can download the ISO installer, Datasheet, and the Admin Guide. As you can see the ISO is around 1.5 GB.

Upload your PDM ISO.

The ISO uploads successfully.

Beginning the install of Proxmox Datacenter Manager.

Accept the EULA.

Choose the target disk for the installation.

Set the location and timezone.

Configure the admin password and email address.

Set the management network config, hostname, IP, gateway, DNS, etc.

Summary screen.

The server boots to the console prompt.

The login screen for Proxmox Datacenter Manager.

Resources

Below are the resource links for the release of Proxmox Datacenter Manager:

• ISO Image Download: https://www.proxmox.com/en/downloads
• Roadmap: For published and upcoming features, see the Release Notes & Documentation

Wrapping up

Proxmox Datacenter Manager is the tool that everyone I think has been waiting on in the Proxmox ecosystem, a viable centralized management tool. Up until now, we have been managing each host, cluster, and backup server as a standalone environment. Now, though, this gives us the ability to management everything from one dashboard and see the health, metrics, updates, and other relevant information from that centralized location. For home labs I think this is going to be incredible and give us what we have been needing for a while. And certainly for production environments, this makes Proxmox an even more viable solution for the enterprise. What about you? Are you planning on installing the new GA release of Proxmox Datacenter Manager?

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About The Author

Brandon Lee

Brandon Lee is the Senior Writer, Engineer and owner at Virtualizationhowto.com, and a 7-time VMware vExpert, with over two decades of experience in Information Technology. Having worked for numerous Fortune 500 companies as well as in various industries, He has extensive experience in various IT segments and is a strong advocate for open source technologies. Brandon holds many industry certifications, loves the outdoors and spending time with family. Also, he goes through the effort of testing and troubleshooting issues, so you don't have to.

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