Proxmox VE has officially supported ARM64 since 5 August, when PVE 9.2 went out as the first release for a second CPU architecture. The build shares the codebase, the package repositories and the release lifecycle with x86-64, and the announcement presents it as the same product on different silicon, with a short list of architecture notes. What an announcement cannot tell you is what it is like to live in. By now two people have tried, on opposite ends of the hardware, and they largely agree.
What official support means
The platform stack is a full copy of the x86-64 story: Debian 13.5 “Trixie”, Linux kernel 7.0, QEMU 11.0, LXC 7.0, ZFS 2.4, and identical configuration and documentation apart from the architecture notes.
The hardware matrix is the part to read closely. NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper and Vera platforms are fully supported. Other UEFI-based ARMv9-A machines get best-effort support, and ARMv8-A generally works on the same terms. Two requirements do the excluding: the host boots through UEFI, and it describes its hardware through ACPI. Device-tree-only boards are not supported, the Raspberry Pi being the one everyone asks about.
The architecture differences are short. Guests always boot through UEFI using the ARM build of OVMF, so there is no SeaBIOS; there is no CPU microcode package of the intel-microcode kind; SEV memory encryption and GVT-g are x86 features; and guests and live migration stay within an architecture.
What the hands-on says
Jeff Geerling installed it on an Ampere Altra machine the week it arrived and found the install easy, the hardware describing itself through UEFI and ACPI exactly as the design intends. His one snag came later, installing Ubuntu from an arm64 live CD inside a VM, which turned into a forum thread. His post is candid about the caveats that remain.
This week, Christian Lempa published a longer trial on a Minisforum MS-R1, running the everyday surface: installation, VMs, Linux containers, Docker, snapshots, networking and storage. His verdict: “Proxmox itself is ready for ARM, but the surrounding ecosystem still has some catching up to do.” He lists where the catching up lives: a smaller template selection, Proxmox VE Helper Script compatibility, third-party software support, and the limited choice of hardware that qualifies at all.
My read
For most homelabs this says watch, not migrate. If your ARM experience is a shelf of Raspberry Pis, none of it is addressed to you: device-tree boards are excluded by design, and the matrix is written for server-class silicon. What has changed is narrower and more real. The ARM servers arriving now, UEFI and ACPI and all, have a first-class hypervisor waiting on day one. The gap list for living in it daily is boring and specific — arm64 templates, helper scripts that stop assuming x86, install media that boots — and boring lists are how ecosystems get filled in, so this one is worth watching.
Sources: the Proxmox announcement, Geerling’s post, and Lempa’s walkthrough