Ownership and deletion
Change a VM's owner, protect it from deletion, and what a real delete cleans up.
Owners
- Every VM belongs to a user or a group. Owners receive alerts and lease reminders, and owned VMs are what people without the view-all permissions see.
- Change the owner in the VMs table (click the owner cell) or from the action menu. It needs vm.owner.change and is recorded with the old and new owner.
- On Windows guests the owner is added to the local Administrators group. If the guest is not domain-joined yet, the change waits and is applied automatically once the guest has joined and its agent reconnects.
Deletion protection
- Deletion protection is a switch in the resize dialog's behaviour settings (vm.edit.resources).
- It is enforced on the server: protected VMs cannot be deleted through the interface or the REST API.
- Deleting also needs vm.delete and a press-and-hold confirmation, so a stray click never deletes anything.
What delete does
Delete is a real destroy on Proxmox. The VM must be stopped first; a running or suspended VM is refused.
- The guest is destroyed with its disks, snapshots, NICs and HA membership.
- The AD computer object is removed using the project's domain-join account.
- The Verlocx agent is offboarded.
- Existing backups are kept for recovery.
- The freed VMID goes on the reuse blacklist so a new VM cannot inherit its backups or directory entries.
Service Desk has vm.owner.change but not vm.delete: they can hand an orphaned VM to the right team, but decommissioning stays with admins.
Features on this page
- Ownership
- Deletion protection
- Real destroy with cleanup
- Owner as local administrator
More in Virtual machinesAll topics
Create a VMThe seven-step New VM wizard, how names map to VMIDs, placement, and what happens after Create.Power actionsStart, shutdown, reboot, hard stop, suspend and resume, each with its own permission, for one VM or many.The VM page and consoleThe Virtual Machines list, a VM's tabs, and the browser console (noVNC, SSH and RDP).