Proxmox 9 is finally here in all its glory, and there are plenty of cool features added to the latest version of the virtualization platform. The biggest of these changes is the migration to the Debian 13 base, which brings extra security features and newer packages. For data hoarders who adore ZFS as much as I do, the updated version of the all-powerful file system adds the ability to add new drives to existing Zpools.

However, between the SDN stack and HA updates, there are a couple of neat improvements that go unnoticed. The redesigned mobile interface is one such feature that seems to have flown under the radar for the home lab community. But for me, it’s easily one of (if not the) best features of Proxmox 9.

The mobile UI has been reworked from the ground up

The old interface was significantly lacking

While I do believe Harvester’s interface is slightly better due to its minimalist appearance, I have a favorable opinion of Proxmox’s web UI – at least the one on a normal desktop browser. Barring a few extra graphs and options, the desktop version of the web interface is largely unchanged. However, the mobile variant has received some much-needed aesthetic overhauls, as Proxmox 8’s browser interface left a lot to be desired on smartphones. Accessing PVE from a browser on a mobile would present a somewhat decent-looking login screen. However, the first page you’ll encounter is a rather empty-looking Datacenter tab, with just the node name and Proxmox version visible.

Clicking on the node reveals a tiny section containing the specs, PVE version, and uptime of the node, followed by the virtual guests residing in it. While it’s good enough for taking a quick peek at the Proxmox statistics, the mobile interface isn’t intuitive by any means. Likewise, you could start/stop VMs, access their console, and even migrate them (provided you’ve got a cluster environment), but the clunky UI makes it a tad more annoying to do so if you’re on a smartphone.

The new UI feels a lot more intuitive

Thanks to a lot of coding magic involving RUST, the revamped interface feels like a breath of fresh air. The login screen looks a lot better than before, and leads to a Dashboard containing the resource consumption on all nodes connected to the Datacenter, their names, and their collective virtual guests. Clicking on any node displays a proper summary tab listing its individual resources (and even the CPU name) alongside dedicated tabs for the active Services and pending Updates. There’s even a Console button, which lets you run terminal commands straight from your phone, though you may have to use a couple of toggles inside QEMU to get the right screen ratio.

Rather than displaying them right under the node, Proxmox 9 has shifted the virtual guests to their own tab (which is called Resources for some reason) – making everything more manageable. Previously, many of my LXCs would show weird HTML code under their specifications (especially when I used the Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts to deploy them), but the revamped UI neatly arranges everything in a couple of tiles. The Console and Shutdown buttons are also distinctly visible, and I can even create snapshots of the virtual guests and back them up to my storage pools (including the Proxmox Backup Server node connected to my PVE workstation). There are even a couple of toggles for enabling autoboot, console, and some other settings, though that’s all I can do to modify my VMs and LXCs. That brings me to my biggest issue with the updated interface …

But I wish it had some additional features

The extra Backup tab, Console (for the node) button, as well as autostart toggles are decent additions to the mobile UI, but I wish Proxmox offered more settings from the desktop version of the interface. Being able to create new virtual guests and add templates from dedicated tabs would increase the utility of the mobile interface, especially since you can technically perform all that via the Console – provided you’re willing to write multi-line commands. Or you could use ProxMenu. But I digress.

I also would’ve appreciated the ability to modify the CPU, memory, storage, I/O devices, and other resources for my LXCs and VMs. Nevertheless, I really appreciate the reworked interface, as it makes using my smartphones and tablet to monitor and (to some extent) control my home lab more viable.

It’s far from the only useful addition

Monitoring provisions have been upped a notch

Luckily, there are a couple of other improvements to the rich set of PVE features in Proxmox 9. If you click on the Summary tab on a node in the desktop UI, you’ll notice some extra graphs with the pressure shell suffix, which can describe the I/O, CPU, and memory contention between the different services and virtual guests on the node.

While I run most of my home lab experiments on a server-grade workstation, I’ve got a couple of Proxmox nodes in my computing arsenal. However, I often arm the weaker nodes built from laptops and SBCs with low-capacity storage devices. Luckily, the updated ZFS package in Proxmox 9 makes it so that I can add new drives to my existing Zpools, which is a godsend for my secondary nodes that are in dire need of extra storage.

There are even some production-tier facilities

If you’re using Ceph distributed storage in your PVE cluster, Proxmox 9 adds the ability to use Fabric networks. Currently, you can configure two routing protocols – OpenFabric and OSPF – to create mesh networks for Ceph storage. For folks with storage LUNs, Proxmox 9 lets you create snapshots directly on your thickly-provisioned LVM pools.