Proxmox VE 6.0 is an incredible virtualization platform, which works great on everything from low-power computers like the Intel NUC to Intel Xeon-W workstations and massive AMD EPYC based servers with up to 128 cores, 256 threads and 4TB RAM. And Proxmox VE is free, too!

It does use enterprise subscription-only repositories by default, however, and won’t allow you to install upgrades packages without a subscription. This arcticle will show you how to use free, no-subscription, repositories instead. The no-subscription repositories are provided by the Proxmox VE team, but the packages are supposedly not as stable and as thoroughly tested as the packages in the enterprise repositories. The Proxmox VE team don’t recommend using the no-subscription repositories for production use and offer no support for using them.

Enable No-Subscription Repository

First, we’ll disable the default enterprise repository:

$ sudo mv /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.list.disabled

Then enable the no-subscription repository:

$ sudo echo "deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve buster pve-no-subscription" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-no-subscription.list

Finally, update the package cache:

$ sudo apt update

And optionally, upgrade the system:

$ sudo pveupgrade

Make the Changes Persist

In the next article, we’ll make these and other changes persistent across upgrades.

Revision

2019-10-19 Replaced the command to upgrade the system, thanks to itzxtoast.