How to Delete a Virtual Machine in Proxmox

In this tutorial, we’re going to look at how to delete a Virtual Machine in Proxmox.

After you set up virtual machines in Proxmox, you might need to delete a few of them over time, but you must ensure that you reclaim the storage space that they’ve used. The process is extremely simple, but you want to ensure that you delete everything so that you can reclaim the space that the VM is using.

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How to Delete a Virtual Machine in Proxmox

The steps below will look at how to delete a virtual machine in Proxmox, but we will first ensure that all prior backups are deleted so that they don’t claim space on other servers.

1. Select the Virtual Machine that you’d like to remove and select Backup.

selecting the backup tab in a proxmox VM.

2. Select each backup and then select Remove.

removing the backups of a VM in Proxmox.

3. Select Yes to remove the backup file. Please keep in mind that you’ll have to do this for each backup that you have.

NOTE: If you can access the backup location on the destination server, you can delete the backups from there as well. Just make sure that you’re deleting the correct files. If you’d like to be safe, remove them from the Proxmox side to ensure that they’re removed for the correct VM.

confirming you want to remove the backups of a VM.

4. After each backup has been removed, you can move on to the next step of removing the virtual machine. Select the Virtual Machine on the left-hand side of Proxmox.

turning off the VM in Proxmox and selecting it.

5. In the top right corner, select More and then Remove.

NOTE: Ensure that you are on the correct virtual machine!

How to Delete a Virtual Machine in Proxmox - removing a VM in proxmox.

6. Double-check that you’re deleting the correct virtual machine by checking the ID. If it’s correct, enter the ID.

confirming you want to destroy the VM and typing in the ID.

7. Select both options to purge from job configurations and destroy unreferenced disks owned by guest. This will ensure that the jobs and disks owned by the virtual machine will be deleted.

selecting to purge the job configuration and destroy the unreferenced disks.

NOTE: If you receive an error due to the fact that storage was available and is no longer available (as the screenshot shows below), you’ll have to get the storage online or remove it. This will ensure that you can delete the virtual machine.

viewing the status of the deletion and errors that may occur (storage that exists and isn't online).

To remove the storage, select Datacenter, then Storage, select the storage location, then remove it (as long as it’s not being used). You can then delete the virtual machine!

removing the storage if necessary in proxmox.

Conclusion – How to Delete a Virtual Machine in Proxmox

This tutorial looked at how to delete a virtual machine in Proxmox. The actual process of removing a VM is extremely simple, however, it’s a good idea to ensure that you’ve removed all backups first. This will ensure that the data that’s written to any other location is also removed. Please keep in mind that this ensures you do not want the backups either, as you will have no way of restoring this virtual machine after following this process.

Thanks for checking out the tutorial on how to delete a virtual machine in Proxmox. If you have any questions on how to delete a virtual machine in Proxmox, please leave them in the comments!

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