Proxmox VE Reviews

Proxmox VE is used for many sectors, such as medical, IT, and electronics. It is an open-source server management platform.

The most valuable features of Proxmox VE are the ease of containerization. Overall the solution is generic, feature-rich, and has compatibility.

The documentation in Proxmox VE could improve.

I'm new to this type of solution, there are all these features and options to select in various scenarios, but there's not much documentation out there to explain which option you should be choosing for what, and why. I know there are a lot of YouTube articles, Reddit documentation, and other information where people say if you want to do task A, here's is how, and people follow it blindly. However, nobody understands what they're doing, and why.  I'll tackle any task and develop a solution but I need to understand what I'm doing. I need to understand why I'm selecting certain options, what makes that appropriate, what would make the other option inappropriate, the pros and cons, the whole run-through. I find the documentation lacking.

What I have noticed while I'm running a firewall, FireHOL, which works with DNS, and a media server all runs on my Gen 8 MicroServer. It's an I3350 with 10 gigs of RAM, and I do find that the RAM usage is pretty high. I know I do not have all the RAM allocated to the containers, but I find that the overheads there seem to be pretty high. The high RAM usage comes with input-output latency. I don't seem to have the same problem on the dual Xeon, but again that has infinitesimally more computational power, one would expect that to run quicker.

When it comes to the firewall and other aspects, I'm only looking for a simple solution, low power consumption, good performance at home, to keep my home network on. If the documentation went into a bit more detail on what the overhead requirements of Proxmox VX are and why, and how to optimize, especially when you start bringing in Oracle ZFS and VFS power systems. The RAM usage increases a lot. There's practically nothing about that in the documentation. You have to hunt down the details in VFS, and its functionality elsewhere to figure it out.

On the dual Xeon, for distributed computing, it is running fine. The system is running 24/7 without any problems.

At the moment, one of the limitations is hardware passthrough into containers. To do that, you have to start getting privileged containers. I know there's a lot of hype in the public domain as to the pros and cons of that, and some parts are supported and some are not. It would be interesting to see if technology could develop to the point where we could pass through hardware into containerized applications.

I have been using Proxmox VE for approximately one year.

Proxmox VE is stable and reliable.

Server stability's been phenomenal and I'm running it on several old HP MicroServers. They're Gen 7, using the AMD Turion chips. I've been running it on the Gen 8, I3, 350, and dual CPU E3 in Xeon. there are some performance differences based on what the hardware's capable of, but no matter what platform I run it on there has not ever been any stability problems whatsoever.

The scalability is good. If you're working with generic processor models, it's easy to shift them across different platforms once you place the CPUs.

I have not needed to use the support from Proxmox VE. I have found all the answers I have needed online from user groups and Wiki support pages.

I rate the documentation and community support from Proxmox VE a three out of five.

I have used previously VMware and VirtualBox. Both are installs that have been on Microsoft Windows, and I found them both to be very limiting, very difficult to set up and manage. Proxmox VE, I found to be the easiest to use, quickest in terms of response, and has the best functionality.

The initial setup is very easy. Once you get the hang of it, setting up the VMs, containers, and deploying them is incredibly quick.

The setup for most of the configurations is similar, once you understand the concepts and the principles, it comes down to basics. You know your hardware and what you're setting up, and what it's capable of doing. You can't set up older generation hardware and then expect to have PCI Express Passthrough or GPU Passthrough, because the hardware doesn't support it.

You can't expect the solution to do what the base hardware is not capable of doing. Work within the constraints of the hardware, understand your hardware, and the OS.

You can download the solution and it is an open-source installation, it is exactly the same as their commercial solution.

The maintenance of the solution depends on how you've set it up. If you've only set it up as a functional hypervisor, you have your VMs running, and that's the last thing you did, then you're going to have to come back every two weeks or every month to check on your OS updates, upgrades, and security patches, et cetera. However, you can automate a lot of that with Cron jobs. It's about learning the system which is based on Debian. If you understand Linux and Debian, you will understand how powerful the system is and what you can actually do with it. When you start running things, such as Monits or syslogs, you can automate any error messaging or any problems and it can be sent to your system administrator in an email.

Whether it's a case of regular backups that are happening, if everything is working well, then great, but if one fails, an I/O error or other errors pop up and you get notified of it quickly, then you can fix it easily. If you're only coming in every four weeks to have a look at it and see what's going on, things could have gone horribly wrong.

I would suggest to anybody who's running a hypervisor, is schedule regular backups. Back up your VMs regularly. Schedule it. Automate it, and make sure it happens on a separate machine, onto a separate machine, onto a separate host- because you don't want to lose your VM with all its backups.

If you've taken the time to set it up well with all your Cron jobs and automation, there will be almost zero maintenance.

I rate the implementation of Proxmox VE a five out of five.

To use Proxmox VE there is not a license required. However, you can purchase a support license, which you access, but it doesn't change the functionality of the solution.

Their licensing is very similar to other solutions, such as Canonical and Ubuntu. The full OS is available to you. If you want the support, you will need to pay a license fee.

My advice to others wanting to implement this solution is if you're looking to virtualize, ask yourself why. In terms of bringing your costs and energy consumption down, never mind the whole global eco-footprint hype that everybody wants to get onto. The reality is, for any business, keeping a business afloat is about dollars and cents, and if you can accomplish your IT tasks at a lower cost and expense, have better utilization of hardware, you've probably already hacked a path to what way to move forward.

Instead of spending hundreds of thousands on multiple servers, to then have a less than 5% utilization on each machine, while they using up 500, 600 watts of power, is not efficient. With virtualization, you're running multiple VMs on one physical piece of hardware. You get much better utilization out of it, you're getting much more for the money you are paying, and without any significant drop in performance.

When one considers the internal networking on the VM, where you have different VMs and your containers are running on internal networks. You're not limited to gigabits or 10-gigabits throughputs. It runs on the PCI Express speeds on the board, it is a lot quicker.

I rate Proxmox VE an eight out of ten.

The tool has very good performance.

The solution needs to improve its stability.

I have been using the solution for one month.

I would rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

The tool’s setup is easy. The setup took two weeks to complete.

I would rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We have many use cases for this solution, including electric services. 

We are happy with Proxmox VE. We use it as part of a cluster. The solution has a very good user interface and price. 

I had a few problems regarding instability.

One additional feature that could be beneficial is application storage. 

I have been using the solution for two years. 

When it comes to scalability, I am satisfied with Proxmox. I got everything that I needed with Proxmox. Currently, my team consists of 15 people but we have 1,000 clients.

We migrated our old servers with Proxmox VE. 

The initial setup was simple. Deployment took us several weeks. 

We do not have any licensing costs. 

We did not evaluate other options. We tried out Proxmox VE two years ago and have been using it since. 

I recommend the main features of this solution considering its price. The only disadvantage of Proxmox VE is that it is a young solution so it does have some bugs.

There are a number of services that we need, such as a dedicated phone system and an Active Directory server, that we run in a virtualized environment. Doing so means that we don't need to use dedicated hardware for them.

This is a low-use, but a high-need solution for us. It is helpful because it means that we don't need dedicated hardware for all of our services. It has allowed us to grow the way we have, over the past couple of years.

The most valuable feature is the ease of deployment.

For the most part, it is quite user-friendly.

The interface can be a little bit rough in places. There are some things that need to be done using the command-line interface, and these should be moved into the web-based interface. There are also aspects related to storage that are difficult to do with the interface.

We have been using Proxmox for between two and three years.

We have had absolutely no problems with stability.

Scalability is excellent and it seems to run with quite a low overhead.

I have been experimenting with adding nodes to the cluster so that we can create more of a high-availability system. The process is just a matter of installing the software and then copying and pasting the license key. It couldn't be easier.

I have not had problems that necessitated contacting technical support.

I did not use a similar solution prior to implementing Proxmox.

The initial setup is easy.

I am the person who is responsible for configuring and maintaining Proxmox.

This is a product that I recommend trying. There are others that are bigger and better, albeit priced accordingly. This should definitely be tried and put through its paces.

Overall, this is a good product, although there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use VM for high availability. 

Proxmox VE has many containers. You need to download the image and do basic configuration, after which it is operational within a few minutes. The solution provides many containers that are light in use and don't use a lot of memory. You don't have to spend a lot of resources. 

The tool needs to add a lot of containers. 

I rate the product's scalability a ten out of ten. 

Proxmox VE's installation is very simple. 

Proxmox VE is free of cost. 

Proxmox VE is free and is a lot more professional than VMware. I rate it a ten out of ten. 

It's used for server virtualization on a client-facing network.

Its compatibility is most valuable. For any VM or specification, if I have the license, there could be one cluster for it.

The management can be better. It's not like VMware where you can get all clusters on a single dashboard. In VMware, you can literally see all the VMs running in one cluster regardless of the host.

I've been using this solution for just a year.

I'd rate it a six out of ten in terms of stability. Because we don't have a professional engineer for Proxmox VE, we are very reliant on our suppliers. So far, we haven't experienced any bugs, but as an IT specialist, I haven't had any formal training for Proxmox VE. It's an open-source virtualization platform.

It's scalable, but it lacks automation. You have to configure the memory for the system to be automated. I'd rate it a six out of ten in terms of scalability.

It's for our external servers, and we probably have more than five thousand users.

We are very reliant on our supplier for support. I haven't got any chance to get in touch with Proxmox support.

I've used other solutions. Proxmox VE is much harder to use than ESXi and AHV.

It's easy, but the management is not really that efficient for us, so I'd rate it a seven out of ten.

It usually takes two days to conclude. There is also migration. Migrating less than twenty VM to a newly configured Proxmox would approximately take two to three working days.

It's very cheap.

I'd recommend it for a small business or a startup business. It's very helpful for those who are starting up and have fewer users. For DR scenarios or use cases, it would be worth it.

Overall, I'd rate it a seven out of ten.

At the moment, it's used for the virtualization of everything within my test environment.

I'm not using the newest version of Proxmox.

It brings all those benefits that virtualization brings. It reduces cost. I don't have to invest so much in buying many servers. I can go buy one new server with enough resources, and I can virtualize using that server. I can also layer features, such as routing, firewall, HTTP, and VLANs, on top of that.

In addition to the virtualization, the firewall and the routing functions that it provides are valuable.

Its user interface can be improved. In the version that I am using, not all functions can be performed by using the UI. There can be some improvement on that. I'm assuming that it has already been improved in the latest version.

I have been using this solution for the past three years or so.

It has been absolutely wonderful in terms of reliability and performance.

I see the options for scalability, but for my own use case, I don't have the need to have several instances. It is just for my test environment, but the options that they provide sound interesting. There are some high availability configurations for multiple Proxmox instances.

My environment has about 30 users. It is being used every day. It is an operational tool because the environment has to be up.

The way the licensing is structured is that you have to pay for the support. My use case is just for my test environment. I have not deployed it on production, so I've not had any need for technical support.

I've worked in environments where other solutions, such as VMware, have been used, but personally, I have not used any other solution. This is the first solution I am using as far as virtualization is concerned.

For me, it was straightforward. There are different user levels for things like this, but it was straightforward for me. It takes about a day or two.

I implemented it myself. For its deployment and maintenance, you need a minimum of one and a maximum of two people. The second person is for backup reasons when the primary resource is not available.

I have absolutely seen an ROI. I am not able to measure the actual value in terms of returns, but because I've invested nothing, apart from the cost of the server or the hypervisor upon which the Proxmox is installed, the value that we've got from it has been huge.

The way the licensing of Proxmox is structured, you can use it for free. It is an open-source solution, and you can use it for free, but if you do need support, then you have to pay for the support. So, you can use it in a way that you don't have to pay anything, which is a plus point for me. For people or users who have huge and more intense use cases, the advice or the recommendation is to always pay for support. In case something goes wrong, you can fall back on the team that will attend to your request. For me, at the moment, the cost is zero.

I would advise that you weigh your use cases very well before deciding whether to use Proxmox or not. It meets the needs of my use case, and I don't have any reason to complain. If there is a switch or change in my use case, I might decide to not use Proxmox. I might consider some other solution.

If you want to run Proxmox without paying for support, like any open-source solution, you have to read the documentation and be familiar with all the dependencies and requirements for your environment. Once you have all of that covered, you are good.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

We sell Proxmox VE solutions to our customers. The workload to help our customers may be the biggest use case to be on the cloud. We use a bunch of statuses, and different ways to deliver databases, and SQL Servers. So, that's the natural way we use the platform on the cloud.

It has a good performance and you can cluster it.

It's more about the clusters. The clusters are pretty much good and have a high performance and impact.

For now, we're planning to migrate to another solution because there seems to be a lot of backups that we have set up. We have reviewed Proxmox VE but we want to focus more on our customers. In fact, we have already finished our first deployment and we will receive more features that will go to the cloud.

I have been using Proxmox VE for the past five years.

You don't have to be very observant. We have maybe three times the hard one, but it seems as if this is an open-source solution that is supported by the community, and it's okay.

If you feel you have the skills to do it, you can go hands-on by yourself to do these deliveries, and it's going to be very useful for the solution. You need to have the training and the right skills.

For now, we are pretty much working on that, but I think someday, we will make it solve another class from our class which is very good because we have an installation. If you start from the beginning, it's the third one, maybe you have the profile, so you will deploy it in maybe four days.

So it's what you have to like to go there, but it can work because if you have some problems, you have that resource to go and I found things they will need. They will keep you updated and will help you a lot. So if you ask me, their service is good. The community forum is very technical, and they're quick to respond when they are messaged.

The setup is very easy, but the problem is when you have to customize the solution they're talking about more episodes. You have to be more hands-on to have a very good draft, it will be more helpful to have a very good delivery.

For the price, performance is going to be the first takeaway we can offer to our customers.

It's one of those things for me to move things on to the cloud. It's not so easy. I am always on the laptop and have to monitor that because if you want to make strides; you need to stay online. Though we intend to go with a third party to look for another solution, we hope they will fix that in the next release.

The work panel is very good for intake. It's very easy to use and you can scale from other areas which is not a very technical way, so you can use them, including the panel. They can manage their integrated solutions, and that's very good because it's the thing that you want to scale. If the customer wants to operate a downgrade and do something with Proxmox VE, that is what will take you there. You can integrate Proxmox VE with other solutions. Proxmox VE is one thing if you want to start with cloud deployment.