Proxmox Virtual Machine Guest Operating System Integration
June 1, 2024
Proxmox Guest OS Integration
Guest integration is important in hypervisor host to guest integration, allowing guest information to be surfaced at the host level, and for improved management of the operating system at the guest level.
The guest integration often includes memory management, allowing for overprovisioning of guest memory relative to that of the host.
In other words, guest integration can allow you run virtual machines with more RAM in total than the host actually has.
Proxmox is no exception to this, with the qemu guest agent and VirtIO drivers forming the guest integration toolset.
Guest Integration on Windows Operating Systems
When setting up a Windows VM in Proxmox there is a wide variety of devices to choose from, some of which are known to be included in the Windows OS configuration - the Realtek 8139 NIC being a good example.
Other devices, including the VirtIO devices, will need to have their drivers installed as part of the operating system installation - a practice that is less common in most Windows OS installations in more recent years.
The choice of devices is down to personal preference and operating system compatibility - not all will work on all versions of Windows OS.
Windows Server 2019 and 2022 (and 10 / 11 for the user OS) will work with VirtIO - to use this you will need to either install the VirtIO drivers as part of the installation or to install them after the OS has been stood up.
Whatever you choice of drivers, it is best to enable the Qemu Agent and install this from the VirtIO installation ISO to integrate the hypervisor host with VM guest.
The VirtIO drivers and Qemu service application can be found are here.
A demonstration of Windows installation on Proxmox can be found here:
Guest Integration on Linux Operating Systems
As with Windows, the support for different proxmox virtual devices will vary between different versions of Proxmox.
However, as cost should not be a barrier to upgrading your Linux OS, there is one less reason not to be running a supported OS.
That being said, you can check the support for VirtIO on your OS with the following command:
grep -i virtio /boot/config-$(uname -r)
If the value of CONFIG_VIRTIO_BLK and CONFIG_VIRTIO_NET is “y” in the response, it means that the kernel supports VirtIO by default, and no additional action should be necessary for this.
Ubuntu 24.04 supports VirtIO by default.
The qemu agent should be installed using the following commands:
apt-get install qemu-guest-agent
systemctl start qemu-guest-agent
systemctl enable qemu-guest-agent
A demonstration of an Ubuntu Linux installation on Proxmox can be found here: