Proxmox ports itself to Arm with help from Nvidia and Supermicro

Proxmox Server Solutions, the company behind the open source Proxmox virtualization stack, has announced a port of its flagship Virtual Environment to the Arm CPU architecture - and a collaboration with Nvidia and Supermicro that made it happen. The outfit's announcement states that it can now run on 64-bit ARM (arm64/aarch64), but the only fully supported platforms are Nvidia's Grace Hopper and Vera. Proxmox will also provide best-effort support" for other UEFI-based ARMv9-A or newer hardware, and says ARMv8-A generally works as well". If you fancy trying it on a single-board Arm machine like the Raspberry Pi, you're out of luck because Proxmox's stack won't work on such boxes. You may, however, soon be able to run Proxmox on other Arm servers because the company says it is also working together with further enterprise server vendors on their ARM efforts and hope to expand the list of officially supported hardware platforms in the future." Proxmox's press release says the release is the product of a technical collaboration with NVIDIA and Supermicro" and revealed the software is already operating across select enterprise production environments." The company said it aimed the release at organizations building modern and energy-efficient data centers." Technical collaborations don't come from nowhere: Vendors get them going when they see customer demand. This release therefore suggests Nvidia and Supermicro customers want to virtualize their AI infrastructure. Nvidia has a long partnership with VMware, the server virtualization market leader in terms of revenue and technical chops. Last year, the Broadcom business unit told The Register its customers are in no rush to adopt Arm servers in their datacenters or in hybrid clouds that work across x86 servers and Arm-based cloud instances. VMware does, however, think the prevalence of Arm-powered machines on the network edge, where they are increasingly used to run AI workloads, has caught the eye of some customers. It is therefore moving slowly to port its products to Arm. Nvidia, Supermicro, and Proxmox are clearly hearing and/or responding to different voices. Analyst firm IDC recently found non-x86 servers account for almost half of all spending, but very few enterprise server vendors make Arm-based servers. HPE and Supermicro are the most prominent dabblers, but there's little evidence either company has won significant sales. The Arm surge instead comes from hyperscale clouds like AWS, Microsoft, and Google - all of which have created their own CPUs based on the architecture. Proxmox is not alone in supporting server virtualization on Arm. Chinese virtualization player Sangfor is there already, as is SUSE. The open-source Xen and KVM hypervisors also support the platform. The Arm-compliant version of Proxmox's Virtual Environment is version 9.2. The company says the release shares the code base, package repositories, and release lifecycle with its x86-64 counterpart." That means it is built on Debian 13.5 "Trixie" and version 7.0 of the Linux kernel. It also includes QEMU 11.0, LXC 7.0, and ZFS 2.4. Configuration, tooling, and documentation are identical to x86-64, except for a small set of architecture-specific differences," Proxmox says. The product is FOSS so you can download it here. (R)