Nutanix is popular with traditional larger enterprise VMware type customers, Proxmox is popular with the smaller or homelabber refugees. Exceptions exist to each of course.
Sorry, but I bought Proxmox 7, but it is not comparable. Incus does everything (and more) with better interface, WAY better reliability, and also not like a hundred EUR or whatever. (100 EUR is fine with me if better, but not if not better...)
I was looking to setup Proxmox for my homelab soon but this comment got me interested in Incus. Mostly because I've never heard of any Proxmox alternatives before this. You can try out Incus in your browser here: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/try-it/
The demo does take ~10m to get into a working instance.
Incus has a pretty bare-bones web UI without nary any metrics, which is a bit of a pain when you're trying to track down CPU hogs. Proxmox, on the other hand, makes things very much visible and easy to use.
Watching hypervisors slowly improve over the last few years has been amazing. They aren't quite to the point that I will install them under any new hardware I buy and then put my daily driver OS on top, but they are very close. I think a strong focus on creating 'the OS under your OS' experience seamless could open up a lot more here.
I'm not sure I would want my daily driver to be a hypervisor... Whats controlling audio, do I really need audio kernel extensions on my hypervisor? Whos in charge when I shut the lid on my laptop...
But the moment you stop trying to do everything locally Proxmox, as it is today, is a dream.
It's easy enough to spin up a VM, throw a clients docker/podman + other insanity onto it and have a running dev instance in minutes. It's easy enough to work remotely in your favorite IDE/dev env. DO I need to "try something wild", clone it... build a new one... back it up and restore if it doesn't work...
Do I need to emulate production at a more fine grained level than what docker can provide: easy enough to build something that looks like production on my proxmox box.
And when I'm done with all that work... my daily driver laptop and desktop remain free of cruft and clutter.
I have a PC where I installed Proxmox on bare metal and put a daily-use desktop OS on top. It works surprisingly well, the trickiest part was making sure the desktop OS took control of video/audio/peripherals.
As my main desktop computers I've been using Fedora and Windows (for gaming only) virtualised on top of a single proxmox host with 2 GPUs passed through for more than 10 years... Upgraded all the way to latest versions (guests and hosts) without ever having to reinstall from scratch. I upgraded the hardware a few times (just cloned the disks), and since the desktops are virtualised, Windows always worked fine without complaining about new hardware drivers (only thing to change was GPU driver)
Another benefit is block-level backups of the VMs (either with qcow2 disks files or ZFS block storage, which both support snapshots and easy incremental backups of changed block data only)
Proxmox is great for this, although maybe not on a laptop unless you're ready to do a lot of tweaks for sleep, etc.
So with support for OCI container images, does this mean I can run docker images as LXCs natively in proxmox? I guess it's an entirely manual process, no mature orchestration like portainer or even docker-compose, no easy upgrades, manually setting up bind mounts, etc. It would be a nice first step.
Also hoping that this work continues and tooling is made available. I suppose eventually someone could even make a wrapper around it that implements Docker's remote API
15-20 years ago this wouldn't have been a company. It would have been a strong but informal open collaboration where
smart and just people funded by various entities around the world kept it running.
Then the opportunity to get rich by offering an open source product combined with closed source extras+support was invented. I don't like this new world.
Edit: Somewhere along the line, we also lost the concept of having a sysadmin/developer person working at like a municipality contributring like 20% of their time towards maintenance of such projects. Invaluable when keeping things running.
The only thing missing making Proxmox difficult in traditional environment is a replacement for VMware's VMFS (cluster aware VM file system).
Lots and lots of organizations already have SAN/storage fabric networks presenting block storage over the network which was heavily used for VMware environments.
You could use NFS if your arrays support it, but MPIO block storage via iscsi is ubiquitous in my experience.
What is this "application containers" BS, just add native docker stack support. Most folks in the self hosting community already deploy nested dockers in LXCs, just add native support so we can cut out the middle man and squeeze out that indirection.
Somehow, their web developer managed to break scrolling on Safari, so I am unable to navigate the linked site. If anyone else was looking for a list of what has changed in recent releases, it can be found at https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Roadmap
25 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 49.4 ms ] thread(Perhaps if you're a Microsoft shop you're looking at Hyper-V?)
Sorry, but I bought Proxmox 7, but it is not comparable. Incus does everything (and more) with better interface, WAY better reliability, and also not like a hundred EUR or whatever. (100 EUR is fine with me if better, but not if not better...)
The demo does take ~10m to get into a working instance.
Proxmox has nice web GUI
When it matures I’ll look into switching from Proxmox.
But the moment you stop trying to do everything locally Proxmox, as it is today, is a dream.
It's easy enough to spin up a VM, throw a clients docker/podman + other insanity onto it and have a running dev instance in minutes. It's easy enough to work remotely in your favorite IDE/dev env. DO I need to "try something wild", clone it... build a new one... back it up and restore if it doesn't work...
Do I need to emulate production at a more fine grained level than what docker can provide: easy enough to build something that looks like production on my proxmox box.
And when I'm done with all that work... my daily driver laptop and desktop remain free of cruft and clutter.
Another benefit is block-level backups of the VMs (either with qcow2 disks files or ZFS block storage, which both support snapshots and easy incremental backups of changed block data only)
Proxmox is great for this, although maybe not on a laptop unless you're ready to do a lot of tweaks for sleep, etc.
https://youtu.be/4-u4x9L6k1s?t=21
>no mature orchestration
Seems to borrow the LXC tooling...which has a decent command line tool at least. You could in theory automate against that.
Presumably it'll mature
Then the opportunity to get rich by offering an open source product combined with closed source extras+support was invented. I don't like this new world.
Edit: Somewhere along the line, we also lost the concept of having a sysadmin/developer person working at like a municipality contributring like 20% of their time towards maintenance of such projects. Invaluable when keeping things running.
Lots and lots of organizations already have SAN/storage fabric networks presenting block storage over the network which was heavily used for VMware environments.
You could use NFS if your arrays support it, but MPIO block storage via iscsi is ubiquitous in my experience.
Adventures in upgrading Proxmox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45981666 - Nov 2025 (10 comments)
I learned stuff like this years ago with upgrades to debian/ubuntu/etc - upgrading a distribution is a mess, and I've learned not to trust it.