Proxmox Node Management

The Proxmox VE node management tool (pvenode) allows you to control node specific settings and resources.

Currently pvenode allows you to set a node’s description, run various bulk operations on the node’s guests, view the node’s task history, and manage the node’s SSL certificates, which are used for the API and the web GUI through pveproxy.

Wake-on-LAN

Wake-on-LAN (WoL) allows you to switch on a sleeping computer in the network, by sending a magic packet. At least one NIC must support this feature, and the respective option needs to be enabled in the computer’s firmware (BIOS/UEFI) configuration. The option name can vary from Enable Wake-on-Lan to Power On By PCIE Device; check your motherboard’s vendor manual, if you’re unsure. ethtool can be used to check the WoL configuration of <interface> by running:

ethtool <interface> | grep Wake-on

pvenode allows you to wake sleeping members of a cluster via WoL, using the command:

pvenode wakeonlan <node>

This broadcasts the WoL magic packet on UDP port 9, containing the MAC address of <node> obtained from the wakeonlan property. The node-specific wakeonlan property can be set using the following command:

pvenode config set -wakeonlan XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX

The interface via which to send the WoL packet is determined from the default route. It can be overwritten by setting the bind-interface via the following command:

pvenode config set -wakeonlan XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX,bind-interface=<iface-name>

The broadcast address (default 255.255.255.255) used when sending the WoL packet can further be changed by setting the broadcast-address explicitly using the following command:

pvenode config set -wakeonlan XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX,broadcast-address=<broadcast-address>

Task History

When troubleshooting server issues, for example, failed backup jobs, it can often be helpful to have a log of the previously run tasks. With Proxmox VE, you can access the nodes’s task history through the pvenode task command.

You can get a filtered list of a node’s finished tasks with the list subcommand. For example, to get a list of tasks related to VM 100 that ended with an error, the command would be:

pvenode task list --errors --vmid 100

The log of a task can then be printed using its UPID:

pvenode task log UPID:pve1:00010D94:001CA6EA:6124E1B9:vzdump:100:root@pam:

Bulk Guest Power Management

In case you have many VMs/containers, starting and stopping guests can be carried out in bulk operations with the startall and stopall subcommands of pvenode. By default, pvenode startall will only start VMs/containers which have been set to automatically start on boot (see Automatic Start and Shutdown of Virtual Machines), however, you can override this behavior with the --force flag. Both commands also have a --vms option, which limits the stopped/started guests to the specified VMIDs.

For example, to start VMs 100, 101, and 102, regardless of whether they have onboot set, you can use:

pvenode startall --vms 100,101,102 --force

To stop these guests (and any other guests that may be running), use the command:

pvenode stopall

The stopall command first attempts to perform a clean shutdown and then waits until either all guests have successfully shut down or an overridable timeout (3 minutes by default) has expired. Once that happens and the force-stop parameter is not explicitly set to 0 (false), all virtual guests that are still running are hard stopped.

First Guest Boot Delay

In case your VMs/containers rely on slow-to-start external resources, for example an NFS server, you can also set a per-node delay between the time Proxmox VE boots and the time the first VM/container that is configured to autostart boots (see Automatic Start and Shutdown of Virtual Machines).

You can achieve this by setting the following (where 10 represents the delay in seconds):

pvenode config set --startall-onboot-delay 10

Bulk Guest Migration

In case an upgrade situation requires you to migrate all of your guests from one node to another, pvenode also offers the migrateall subcommand for bulk migration. By default, this command will migrate every guest on the system to the target node. It can however be set to only migrate a set of guests.

For example, to migrate VMs 100, 101, and 102, to the node pve2, with live-migration for local disks enabled, you can run:

pvenode migrateall pve2 --vms 100,101,102 --with-local-disks