In this tutorial, we’re going to look at how to delete a Virtual Machine in Proxmox.
After you set up virtual machines (VMs) 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.
Prerequisites to Deleting a Virtual Machine (VM) in Proxmox
Before we look at how to delete a VM in Proxmox, please remember that this will delete the entire VM and its backups! If you do not want to delete the backups, you can move them to a separate server to keep them available, and can always restore the backup if needed!
However, from a functionality perspective, it generally makes sense to delete the Virtual Machine (VM) and the Proxmox backups as they’ll take up unnecessary space in the event that the VM is no longer needed.
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.
2. Select each backup and then select Remove.
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.
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.
5. In the top right corner, select More and then Remove.
NOTE: Ensure that you are on the correct virtual machine!
6. Double-check that you’re deleting the correct virtual machine by checking the ID. If it’s correct, enter 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.
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.
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!
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 deleting a VM in Proxmox 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!
