Last year I had applied for a job where we would have to manage Windows servers. Stuff with Active Directory and storage... I'm Linux guy but have extended experience in WinServer 2012. I just set up a server, boot ProxMox, spun up as many as Win Server 2016 instances I wanted to experiment with all the aspects of the new Win Server and guess what? I was second in the job interview. Thank you ProxMox. You is the best.
I can't say enough good things about PVE! I started managing VMware in 2003 and ESXi is a wonderful product. I was running ESXi at home on the free license which only gives you eight vCPUs (if I remember correctly). After hitting that limit, I slowly decided to move to PVE. I was able to migrate my machines quite easily and have never looked back. For so many use cases, PVE is just as good as ESXi. If you're looking to virtualize and have relatively straightforward requirements, it's worth a look. Free is great and it's rock solid. I made that switch three years ago and haven't had a single issue.
One thing I've never understood with Proxmox is why networking can't be configured host-side. It seems you are expected to go into each new VM and manually set network settings. Why not have a DHCP server on the host that hands out prescribed addresses by VM id?
If Proxmox could do this in addition to maintaining port forwarding to these VMs I would be happy.
I installed Proxmox at a previous job, doing snapshots in seconds on a database container was nice for backups and the UI makes you feel informed and in control
I would recommend it for most businesses honestly
Proxmox is awesome. :)
Back several years ago I worked on a project to build a system for making demos of network solutions. We ran Proxmox inside of an ESX virtual machine and then used it to virtualise various pieces of the demo architecture. The ESX image could simply be coped to an external drive for the consultant to use.
Ultimately the company went for a central-lab demo environment instead but it was pretty cool anyway.
The demo itself was stored as a bunch of Ansible playbooks and assorted scrips so it was Git-friendly, to be applied to a generic ESX template.
We built cool things like a canvas-based Visio-like UI that could be used to define VMs / containers / networks and provision at the touch of a button.
Similarly the solution itself would be visualised using a diagram that supported dynamic components like links showing traffic, counters, graphs etc that would show traffic running between the VMs inside the demo.
We also had a central server that would store pre-created demo templates using Ceph that could checked-out for use via a web UI.
Fun times :)
Love Proxmox. It has its quirks but overall a great platform for home usage (labs etc) and for small businesses.
Probably one of the more notable current applications that still use a lot of Perl. The admin interface is mostly Perl, as are many of the command line utilities.
I've been running proxmox since v3.0 with lots of success. I admit that back then you could break stuff easily if you did not know what you're doing. Over the time I've been running it continuously with every version in my homelab and it just got more awesome. I tried ESXI and Microsoft Server.. But in the end I always went back to Proxmox and the very stable debian that runs it. Now with the latest version ZFS encryption is also native and I have pretty much everything I could ask for. Can only recommend!
Proxmox is good with the large exception of high speed interconnects.
If I have Mellanox IB cards in my servers, proxmox fails to handle ipoib without a lot of legwork. Compare that to something like oVirt; that supports it out of the box.
There is very little incentive for me to recommend a proxmox subscription to any of my clients because having >= 40 gbit interconnects is far better than using lags on single gbit. High traffic internal applications, (and migration!) benefit so much from those interconnects.
The company behind it in Vienna tried to recruit developers for 3200eur bruto/month, I found this super low compared to current standards.
I had a brief stint with proxmox a few weeks ago and didn't like it much. I didn't like the nag popup when you don't have a subscription (and I had installed the nosubscription package!). I migrated to it to see if it would be easier to manage than OpenStack, but I honestly found OpenStack easier to deal with, probably due to familiarity.
I've used Proxmox on my dedicated host and it was working really well, however one problem I've encountered is that it doesn't really play well with guest OpenBSD (guest randomly was hanging, with no apparent pattern). But Linux and Windows worked perfectly.
I gave proxmox a solid try for virtualizing a mattermost instance. But it was just way too slow compared to bare metal. Chats took seconds to load instead of ms. I'm sure there's some explanation for it but I couldn't be assed to figure it out and reverted.
Proxmox is pretty cool, but it doesn't make sense unless you're running many machines and utilizing ceph. For a home user, Debian (or some other stable distro) is still going to be the best distro for doing hypervisor stuff.
I'm currently using Yunohost, but I'm finding the system a bit brittle for some use-cases, and some choices rather arbitrary (which was also the point, as I initially chose it to spend less time managing my server).
I would like something a bit more fleximble, and was seriously thinking about jumping to Guix or Nix. Does any of you have any input on this? Proxmox is also a candidate, as I could run my old Yunohost side-by-side with Nix, Guix, and others, I guess. I'm just afraid of overcomplexifying my nginx config.
Allso, if I run Guix/Nix on Proxmox, I'll lose the declarative config advantage... Is the opposite possible?
Proxmox running on a nuc i7 with 64GB of ram and a fast nvme drive. The system is very fast and takes very little space. Just wish I had an extra nic.
Used proxmox in its earliest iterations within a startup and found it fantastic.
Recently I tried it again when attempting to install Untangle on a system with EFI. Untangle didn’t support EFI so I needed to virtualize it.
I found it too difficult to get software network adapters to work with different physical network cards.
Switched over to VMware ESXi and had vswitch configured within minutes.
YMMV and I’d still recommend Proxmox for simple virtualization projects.
Just set up Proxmox on my home lab last week. I’m slowly ramping up the learning curve. Sounds like I made the right choice.
Would be cool to see an addon for NAS services in Proxmox... I'm setting up a home server when I get the chance and just want it to run a VM, a handful of docker containers and provide NAS storage at home. In the end, will probably add Docker support, run the NAS in a container or vm and leave it at that.
Proxmox is pretty nice, except it has two glaring issues:
Setting up networks is a pain in the butt.
Setting up storage is even worse.
Both really require the command line, which shouldn’t be necessary.
I ran Proxmox in production for a year for a small ecom company, but if I had to do it again, I’d go vSphere. It’s worth it.
What is your experience with major proxmox and OS updates?
We use it at work since Proxmox 3.
The only thing I miss is a truly compatible Terraform module that lets you create accounts, machines and infrastructure. That would be cool
What's wrong with using plain libvirt tools, like virsh? Is there some other advantage to Proxmox besides having a nice WebUI?
I cannot stand the Proxmox software. It’s a total pain in the ass to use.
XCP-NG is also a nightmare due to how half baked Xen Orchestra is.
VMWare ESXi is the only type 1 hypervisor that I would ever recommend to a fellow hacker. You can get a free license for personal use.
Can't say enough about how I appreciate Proxmox. I had tried Xenserver but it didn't play well with my setup. Proxmox is robust from GUI and CLI. I run two small businesses from my home and the setup allows me to efficiently host pFsense, a mail server, multiple web and DB servers.
But even better for me, the ease and ability to pass through a GPU and run Windows in a VM while using modifiable resources makes it so flexible.
I've been a customer for over two years and they provide support with a super reasonable yearly subscription of just $99. The forum is active and the updates are recent and up to speed.