Rolling Updates

Rolling Updates automate the process of updating Proxmox VE nodes across a cluster sequentially, ensuring that workloads remain available throughout the update process. Instead of manually updating each node and handling migrations by hand, ProxCenter orchestrates the entire workflow.

Overview

Updating a Proxmox cluster typically involves: putting a node in maintenance, migrating VMs off, running apt upgrade, rebooting if needed, and moving VMs back. Doing this manually across 5, 10, or 50 nodes is tedious and error-prone. Rolling Updates handle this automatically with safety checks at every step.

Update Workflow

For each node in the cluster, ProxCenter performs the following steps in order:

1. Pre-Checks

Before starting, ProxCenter verifies:

• The cluster has enough capacity to absorb workloads from the node being updated
• No other node is already in maintenance or being updated
• All VMs on the node are migratable (no local-only resources blocking migration)
• The node is reachable via SSH

2. Workload Evacuation

Running VMs and containers are live-migrated to other nodes in the cluster. ProxCenter uses the DRS logic to select optimal target nodes based on current resource usage.

3. System Update

The node runs apt update && apt dist-upgrade to install the latest Proxmox packages. The full output is logged and visible in the Task Center.

4. Reboot (if required)

If a kernel update or other reboot-required package was installed, the node is rebooted. ProxCenter waits for the node to come back online and rejoin the cluster before proceeding.

5. Workload Restoration

After the node is updated and healthy, previously migrated VMs can optionally be migrated back to their original node.

6. Next Node

The process repeats for the next node in the cluster until all nodes are updated.

Configuration

Setting	Description	Default
Reboot policy	Always reboot, only if needed, or never	Only if needed
Restore VMs	Migrate VMs back to their original node after update	Enabled
Parallel migrations	Number of VMs to migrate simultaneously during evacuation	2
Timeout	Maximum time to wait for a node reboot before marking it failed	10 minutes

Monitoring Progress

The Rolling Update dashboard shows:

• A visual overview of all nodes with their current state (pending, updating, rebooting, completed, failed)
• The current step being executed on the active node
• Live logs from the update and reboot process
• Estimated time remaining based on previous node durations

warning

If a node fails to come back online after a reboot, the rolling update pauses and alerts you. It does not proceed to the next node to avoid risking cluster quorum.

tip

Schedule rolling updates during a maintenance window. Even though VMs are live-migrated, there may be brief performance impacts during the migration and reboot phases.

Enterprise Feature

Rolling Updates is available in the Enterprise edition.

Permissions

Permission	Description
node.manage	Required to execute updates and reboot nodes
vm.migrate	Required to evacuate and restore workloads