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Asked: 2018-04-12 03:02:14 +0800 CST

When running apt-get dist-upgrade on a PVE host, (when) will this affect running guests?

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So my question is on a Proxmox VE host (let's assume 5.1 in case it matters) when I run apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade and decide to go ahead with the installation of package updates, will this cause KVM-based guests (that's the only kind we're using at the moment) to be stopped/suspended or otherwise affected?

If so, does this depend on a particular package being updated (I imagine the pve-* packages may be of interest here)?

Essentially what I am trying to find out is if the KVM guests will continue running unaffected or if I need to schedule such host updates for a particular time. I realize that I have to schedule reboots into a new kernel in either case.

kvm-virtualization

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    General rules about it, always prepare some backup.

    Now the answer will vary of the component you will update. If it's a upgrade from 5.1.Y to 5.1.X it shouldn't cause any issue. If it upgrade you to the next major version (eg 6.X), here clearly you will need to schedule a downtime for the operation.

    Now, for minor upgrade, it won't hurt to do it with running VM even if it's will always be better to do it with no running VM.

    KVM guest are runned by QEMU/Libvirt, so you can totally restart pve-* services without impacting your running VM.

    You can also restart libvirtd and libvirt-bin services without causing any trouble to your running VM, as each VM is an independent process with his own args and files.

    Of course if you try to run some QEMU/KVM feature (like snapshot) after the upgrade without hard rebooting the VM you may encouter some issues because of an inconsistency between the libvirt version on the server and the one used to run the VM.

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