Proxmox Datacenter Manager Roadmap

Overview

This article provides release notes and a high-level roadmap overview for Proxmox Datacenter Manager.

The Proxmox Datacenter Manager project has been developed with the objective of providing a centralized overview of all your individual nodes and clusters. It also enables basic management like migrations of virtual guests without any cluster network requirements.

Due to the current alpha in-development status of Proxmox Datacenter Manager the specific feature list planned for the first stable 1.0 release is not yet final, and this roadmap includes points that quite probably will only make it in after the first 1.0 release. Further, the roadmap consists not only of specific features that are planned, but also more general concepts we want to evaluate and pain points one currently faces when managing big and/or physically distributed Proxmox VE and Proxmox Backup Server setups.

Roadmap

• Improve the overview of the health state (subscription, valid APT repositories, pending updates, backups done …) of all nodes and resources.
• Better organization of resources, including over multiple remotes, for example with (hierarchical) groups or resource pools.

Finding a specific set of virtual machines, nodes, … is key on large setups, and this will be an important area of work for the final 1.0.

• Simplify adding remotes by implementing a remote-join information endpoint where key information can be copied from to give the PDM all initial information required for connecting to a remote while upholding high guarantees for trust and safety.

Somewhat similar in principle to how the "Join Information" API and UI simplified the process for Proxmox VE clusters, but independent of that as PDM doesn't interface with cluster communication and works on single nodes too.

• Management of some core configurations.
  • Node updates.
  • Backup jobs and their status.
  • Firewall (potentially only done later with SDN integration).
  • Very basic management of the most important virtual guest resources and settings.

Proxmox Datacenter Manager provides a link to the target resource, allowing one to quickly open the fully featured user interface for any complex configurations.

• First-class SDN integration, for example for setting up EVPN between different clusters. Probably the most important feature in the long run.
  • stretching EVPN VNets across clusters
  • support for multiple VRFs across clusters
  • automatic configuration of RT Import / Export
• Off-site replication copies of guest for manual recovery on DC failure (not HA!)
• Evaluate if an active-standby like architecture for the Proxmox Datacenter Manager makes sense, to have a native method to avoid a single point of failure.

  User can just use two Proxmox Datacenter Manager instances for now, metrics collection is doubled, but besides that, it's not much extra overhead.

• Integration of other projects like Proxmox Backup Server and Proxmox Mail Gateway.
• Caching/Tracking of remote tasks.
• Bulk actions like start/stop/(remote-)migrations of virtual guests.
• More complex search/filter syntax.
• Improve ACL schema/handling.
• Improve and polish error messages and handling.
• Improvements on the UI side
  • Show more information and make things like RRD time frames configurable
  • Show/allow more options for migrations
  • Console for remote resources (nodes/guests)
  • Handling MFA for the initial "Probe Remote" connection.
  • Evaluate a Pool-View where the hierarchical resource pools from all remotes are merged.
  • Evaluate a way for limited views that certain users can be assigned too, for example showing only details of the virtual guests but not their nodes.
  • Implement different views for remotes like pool or tag.
  • Add a 'Quick Add' Copy-/Pasteable text (like PVE cluster-join)

Proxmox Datacenter Manager 0.1 ALPHA

• Based on Debian Bookworm (12.8)
• Latest 6.8.12-5 Kernel as stable default
• Newer 6.11 Kernel as opt-in
• ZFS: 2.2.6 (with compatibility patches for Kernel 6.11)

Features (Highlights)

• Connect to and view any number of independent nodes or clusters ("Datacenters")
• View the basic resource usage of all nodes and their guests.

  Saves and caches the list of resources (mainly guests and storage) and their usage metrics to provide a quick overview of all resources and the last-seen state for offline/unresponsive ones.

• Basic management of the resources: shutdown, reboot, start, …

  For more complex management tasks, it provides a direct link to the full web interface of Proxmox VE/Proxmox Backup Server/…

• Remote migration of virtual guests between different datacenters.
• Support for the standard Proxmox feature set including complex Multi-Factor Authentication or ACME/Let's Encrypt from the beginning.

Changelog Overview

Not applicable for the first alpha release.

Known Issues & Breaking Changes

This is an alpha release, there might be lots of stuff that is broken, gets reworked and fixed somewhat frequently.