On August 5, Proxmox released a press release: Proxmox VE 9.2 officially available for 64-bit ARM. The phrase “official arm64 support” in a day turned into several persistent misconceptions on forums and Telegram channels. Let’s go through them one by one — where the myth is contrasted with the text of the announcement itself, you can see it right away.
Myth 1. “Ok, we install Proxmox on Raspberry Pi”
No. And this is written in plain text: the host must boot via UEFI and describe its hardware via ACPI. Single-board computers that describe hardware only via device tree — and Raspberry Pi is named explicitly in the announcement — are not supported.
Jeff Geerling, who installed PVE 9.2 on a workstation with Ampere Altra Max, notes: everything booted from the standard ISO without fiddling precisely because the platform has a proper UEFI/ACPI firmware. About the Pi he writes that enthusiasts were trying to boot via third-party UEFI firmware — but that is exactly the “unsupported configuration” for which no one is responsible if something goes wrong.
Support hierarchy in the announcement is three-tier: full — NVIDIA Grace and Vera; best-effort — other UEFI hardware on ARMv9-A and newer (ARMv8-A “usually works”, also best-effort); none — device-tree-only single-board computers.
Myth 2. “This is a trimmed-down build, just for show”
Also off. The CTO of Proxmox, Thomas Lampricht, states the goal clearly: not to “run on a new architecture,” but to “provide full feature parity — KVM, networking, clustering, ZFS and Ceph behave exactly as users expect from x86-64 builds.”
Technically this is supported by the fact that the arm64 branch shares the same codebase, package repositories, and release cycle with x86-64. In other words, it is not a separate fork that will fall behind in six months, but a second architecture in the same tree.
Myth 3. “If there’s parity, there are no limits”
Here the restrictions are real, and you should know them before buying hardware:
- SeaBIOS on arm64 does not exist. All guests boot via UEFI — AAVMF, ARM build of OVMF. An old VM with legacy boot simply won’t work.
- Guest runs only on its own architecture node, and live migration is possible only between nodes of the same architecture. A mixed cluster can be built, but you can’t “migrate a VM from Xeon to Grace on the fly.”
- No x86-specific features: AMD SEV (VM memory encryption) and Intel GVT-g (shared vGPU) remain on x86.
- No CPU microcode package — microcode updates for ARM live in the platform firmware, not in the distribution.
A separate point mentioned by XDA review: subscribing to x86-64 does not cover arm64 hosts; they need a separate one. The press release itself is more cautious — “support plans available on request.” If you’re budgeting for production, check with Proxmox directly, not via reviews.
Who this is realistically useful for today
Honest answer: for now — owners of server-grade ARM platforms. Grace Hopper and Vera in the announcement are not accidental; the release leans explicitly toward AI infrastructure, where an ARM host with large amounts of coherent memory next to a GPU makes sense.
For a home lab, scenario two is more interesting: Ampere Altra and similar workstations on the used market are no longer exotic, and on these Proxmox VE 9.2 installs natively. Checking hardware suitability comes down to one question — does it support UEFI + ACPI? If yes, the odds are high; if it’s an SBC with device tree, there are no odds regardless of how many cores it has.
Cluster arithmetic: keeping x86 and ARM nodes in one cluster makes sense for general management and high availability within their own architecture, but you’ll need to plan resources using two pools. Decide in advance which services are “architecture-neutral” (almost everything in containers on multi-arch images), and which are nailed to x86 with nails.
Sources
- Proxmox press release: Proxmox Virtual Environment launches official Arm64 Support
- Official announcement on Proxmox forum
- Jeff Geerling: Proxmox officially supports Arm, with some caveats
- XDA: Proxmox releases full support for the arm64 architecture, with a few key caveats
Who already has ARM hardware on which this makes sense to try — Ampere, Grace, something else? And a counter-question: if Proxmox did support device-tree single-board computers after all, would you keep a cluster on Pi — or is it a toy compared to a normal mini-PC on x86 in terms of price?