I’ve been a Proxmox user for a few years now and I’ve seen it in my LAB as well as in production environments and it’s pretty awesome…
I learned about it first when it hit version 6 – if I remember correctly – and at the time I felt it was not there yet for me to really start using it (despite the fact that many brave souls were).
I started testing it at version 7 and I was impressed by how easy it was to use it, how it made sense and how right it felt. I saw it in production at the time as well and I’ve even been tasked with upgrading it to 8 on some pretty big clusters not to mention migrate VMs to it from various environments like VMWare and OpenStack.
If you’re in a rush and feel like skipping the rest of the article the conclusion is this: START USING IT NOW! … just move away from whatever kvm, openstack, opennebula, xen, vmware, etc virtualisation platform you’re using
Why?
1) Xen works, it’s stable, I think some cloud providers might still be using it but it’s just old, it’s cli api sux, the xen orchestra stuff does not feel right when you use it, performance wise to me it feels like it’s slower than KVM and it should not be, too much hassle to configure the various bits and bobs on the network side, etc … (no idea how Citrix Xen works though I’m gonna say it costs money and because it’s still xen it’s not where it needs to be … at least not for me and not for 2025 … )
2) Vanilla kvm (as in using it through libvirt with virt-manager on whatever linux distro you want) works but if you want to do anything more interesting like live migrations or SDN or manage a whole farm of servers things get complicated, a lot of labour is involved in setting that up, etc. If you have a small setup feel free to use it as it’s never let me down but one should aim to do better.
3) If you’re thinking about OpenStack, OpenNebula, oVirt, etc – various orchestrator tools that work with xen or kvm or whatever (Virtuozzo) – yes they work at scale too, they deliver on a lot of the features but you’ll struggle to keep the platform up2date with all the bullcrap python code behind these various UIs and the million services like queues and cluster crap like salt and whatnot … not to mention struggle with configuring them to do what you really need. Virtuozzo is not too bad but could be better.
4) VMWare with or without it’s full suite is just not right anymore. I mean yes it delivers at scale too, it has a ton of functionality but it simply does not feel right to pay them buckets of gold plus their UI is not good enough … sometimes you struggle to find where to change a setting, stuff like that.
5) Hyper-v is just nope, don’t use it … not to mention … buckets of gold …
6) VirtualBox and friends – what can I say … no comment but better than Hyper-v
Remember … I’ve worked with all of the above and what you see is my honest opinion.
Proxmox is the cool kid in town, it’s kvm (as in the good stuff), it’s Debian (as in one of the most solid linux distros that has ever existed), it’s clean and it makes sense (the UI is easy to use, it flows, it feels right), no python which makes me super happy, it’s got a ton of features (from fancy storage to fancy networking), it’s lightweight (really low resource usage to do its job), it scales nicely (you can have big clusters which you can then manage with the DC manager if you want that), it works on a lot more hardware be that supported or not by the vendors, it allows you to run both VMs and LXC containers on the same host oh and it’s free (if you don’t need their support, otherwise the pricing is decent – at least at the time of writing this) and it has a really powerful API which you can use to do pretty much everything you can with its UI.
Proxmox is not perfect but when you look at the other options it comes pretty close 🙂
In my particular case, before switching to Proxmox, I was using vanilla KVM and was doing that because of one thing in particular -> I could emulate other platforms as well (PPC, ARM, etc). I’d like to see the full power of qemu / kvm in Proxmox. Not sure if you’re aware of this but Proxmox has nice support for managing Ceph however what it does not do is object storage. Now I know that’s not the most desired feature but it would earn extra points for completion if it did. Another cool thing would be if you could run Proxmox on different architectures like ARM … I know the demand for something like this does not compare to amd64/i386 but it would be pretty cool and it would also cool if you could run VMs of different architectures like you’re able to with kvm/qemu.
If I had to put together a top 3 virt solutions it would look like this:
1) Proxmox (with backup server(s) and dc manager for any scale)
2) Vanilla KVM on whatever linux (with some bespoke code to glue everything together if scale is needed)
3) Openstack
4) everything else
There you have it, my take on Proxmox and alternatives …
PS. I’m not affiliated with Proxmox in any way, they don’t pay me anything, I have nothing to gain by posting this article, I hope I was not too brutal when I spoke about the others but hey … this is the result of years of using their solutions.