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.

My primary use case for this solution is virtualization.

We have an on-premises deployment.

The most valuable feature of this solution is performance. It is fast.

I would like to see more monitoring in the next release of this solution. Currently, it's simple structured monitoring.

This is a stable solution.

This is a scalable solution. It recognizes memory, so if you add a new hard disk then it is ok.

We have two people who use this solution.

I have never contacted technical support for this solution. I've found everything that I needed to know on the internet.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward, and it is relatively easy to set up.

I performed the implementation myself.

We do not require any staff for deployment and maintenance. It works right out of the box.

This is a solution that I recommend.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case is testing any software by Proxmox.

The solution's compatibility is very good with multiple operating systems. The moving systems are very good and migration is excellent. These are the most valuable features for us.

The solution should include some features that can help with converting raw files into different formats. It should offer better management around raw files.

The stability of the solution is very good.

The solution is scalable.

I've never been in touch with technical support so I can't speak to any direct experience with them. Their website, however, is very helpful.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We use the standard community edition of the solution. We use the on-premises deployment model.

The planning of the volumes is very important because if you're converting from one format to another, you can have some challenges there. I would advise others to plan the setup very, very well so that you do not have to migrate systems into different formats. That's the only challenge that we had.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

It's a solid, stable and powerful open source virtualisation product that has allowed us to bring virtualisation to smaller SMBs at an affordable price.

All our client servers are now virtualised, which has reduced the risk of downtime due to a server failure that used to happen with non-virtualised servers. Servers can be backed up using snapshots etc.

Storage IO management seems the weakest link although this could be hardware related. On decent servers this is not an issue but on smaller custom built servers we have occasionally had issues with IO speed. It is a well thought out product and the newer versions just seem to get better n better.

We've been using it for seven years.

There have been no issues deploying it.

There have been no issues with its stability.

We haven't had any issues scaling it for our needs.

I've never really needed it as I've been able to work out most things intuitively.

We also looked at VMware. Our perception is that this is a superior product but that is subjective as it is not mainstream.

It's straightforward. We have developed a tried and tested method to set up servers and it works well once you know how you want your servers to work.

It's hard to quantity but using Proxmox has significantly boosted our server capabilities and service offering increasing our revenue.

It's open source and provided one has enough experience with Linux and servers it doesn’t cost much other than time to become an expert in the product.

We also looked at VMware.

It's well worth using. It's highly recommended and we have had no issues.

Our primary use case for the Proxmox VE solution is iCloud.

We had issues with this solution when it comes to resources. We have officially created four to five PMs and it just continues to make more resources even though they are delivered in the main post mode. 

Another thing I'd like to see improved is the stability and performance of this solution.

I have been using this solution for about six or seven years.

My impression is that currently, this solution is not stable even after multiple versions of improvements.

We have an ongoing process with their tech support and our team is working with them and with vendors too.

My impression is that the initial setup process is straightforward.

I would rate this solution a four, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

With Proxmox, we use the hypervisor of Proxmox and Proxmox backups. In VMware, I see all the production, like vSphere, vCenter, vRealize Operations Manager, vSAN, Workspace ONE, and VMware Horizon. Right now we are working with NSX. 

For VMware, as a partner, I have many cases of vSAN as a hyperconvergence solution. This solution is very popular in my country, mostly with banks. There are many solutions that we have implemented and that are very successful. Horizon is another solution that is highly requested by clients. Because of the pandemic, the VDI and Remote Desktop are often requested from our clients. Those two are very good solutions. From my experience, I don't have many problems with them.

Proxmox is free, very stable, and doesn't require more resources for memory RAM. It's fine for a small data center.

One issue with Proxmox is that some processes are not automatic. For some processes, you have to do it manually by command line. I don't know about the last version of Proxmox, but I had that problem with this version.

I've been using this solution for one year. In my last job I was a final client, so I worked with vSphere and the vCenter. I did a migration from vSphere to Proxmox, and I was in charge of this infrastructure using Proxmox. I am working for a partner of the VMware product as a presale VMware specialist.

Most implementations are on-premise. We really don't have implementation on cloud. I'm from Bolivia, and we recently have been introducing on-cloud solutions, but most of the solutions are on-premises.

Proxmox is very stable.

For deployment, we used eight blade servers.

Proxmox is is free.

I've worked with VMware, vSphere, vCenter, and vRealize Operations Manager. VSphere works perfectly. The enterprise version is very complete, and you get almost everything you need in data center.

I would rate Proxmox VE 7 out of 10.

We use the solution to host virtual machines, such as: SQL Server Database, Active directory domain services, web services, general cloud applications, and some virtual machines or containers for development and testing purpose. Specially the preference for containers is due to the easly development when the only basic operational system is required istead of fully hardware virtualization (kvm).

We heavly use replication resource to assign some garantine to critical virtual machines wich could run eventually on other sites or hosts, in case of broken internet links, hardware issues or even hacker attacks (many thanks to ZFS working with PVE-ZSync feature that allow planning a standback period of retention snapshots, quickly failover and fallback of virtual machine storage)

It is high availability resources, replication and live-migration (on cluster envirioment). We don't have significant problems with hardware issue or maintenance schedule, because with ZFS, Cephs or other shared storage incorporated in Proxmox technology, it´s possible to migrate virtual machines to other hosts with almost zero downtime.

1) The two-factor authentication: for security reasons!

2) PVE-Zsync: wich allows replication outside clusters, with snapshot retention for quickly failover and failback (by incremental syncs)

3) Large documentation and "How-To" on the wiki page;

4) Many usefull integration: APIs, Active Directory;

5) ACLS, Groups e User Managment: Allows to set and customize permissions.

6) Proxmox Backup Server: Assertive Incrememtal Backup Solution for realible local backups or remote with encryption support! That's perfect.

7) Built on Debian based Kernel, very stable distro

1) PVE-Zsync GUI implementation - This is a very important tool, it could delivery the more advantage in comparision to Xen Orchestra and Microsoft Virtual Machine Replica Service.

2) Central Cluster Administration: The possibility to manage many clusters sites in "one only page" instead of oppening many browsers tabs! IT Cloud companies as us, usually need to access diferent clusters sites, I think it's good idea to centralize the administration GUI for companies that own two or more cluster sites!

3) In connection with my suggestion number 2, the possibility to create a "farm cluster". In few words, the possibility to move virtual machines (live or not) among diferents clusters sites separated by WAN links. Actually, PVE Cluster is realible on local links, due to multicast or udp rings, but in some scenarios when a entire cluster site needs to be put offline (eg, for maintenance or internet issues), a virtua machine migration to other cluster that belongs to the same "farm" but in other region will increase the "value" of Proxmox simular to Microsoft Azure Site Recovery ou Amazon. That will make my evaluation increase from 8 to 9 or even 10!

Since 2014

The technical support is the very complete. I don't  have a subscription, because the support that we need for our applications and solution are available on the Proxmox Wiki However, for big companies we recomend the Proxmox subscription for getting a first class support and best pratices.

Microsoft Hyper-V on situation thats requires Outside Migration (see my comment 3 on the question: what areas could the product or service be improved)

The solution is very easy to set up and implement. It's not complex. We can put a single host or even a Cluster only line in less than one hour! 

Not yet!

Proxmox delivery more cost X Benefits in comparision to VMWare and Citrix Xen. It could be improved in future for more benefits in comparison to XCP-NG and  Microsoft Hyper-V

Citrix Xen-Server and XCP-NG

We currently have more than 160 virtual machines and LXC containers on Proxmox in an all Linux production environment.  

Get the community level if you are on a budget --- keep your software updated to the latest releases.

Live migration. It is easier to balance loads across hypervisors if a given container or virtual machine uses more resources than its peers.

IMPORTANT - use separate physical network for Corosync/Heartbeat functions. This is obscure in the documentation - but you'll find it.

Heartbeat was overwhelmed due to all hypervisors running a single NIC - nodes started to fence themselves when load was high.

Use best practices for network segregation - management / heartbeat / live migration / Ethernet-based storage should be on different networks (VLANs).

N/A.

Very straightforward.

In-House.

The cost is excellent. An excellent choice for budget sensitive operations.