I love Proxmox as a virtual server manager - I can't imagine running anything else as a base for a homelab. Free, powerful, VMs or CTs operating quickly, graphical shell for administration, well documented and used, ZFS is a first class citizen.
I've kind of wanted to build a three node cluster with some low end stuff to expand my knowledge of it. Now they have a datacenter controller. I'd need to build twice the nodes.
Question: Does anyone know large businesses that utilize proxmox for datacenter operations?
Yes!
In this great video from level1techs Wendel walks around in a brand new ai gpu datacenter, an engineer tells what they use for all the normal stuff :-)
We run proxmox on a bunch of hardware servers, but for "homelab" we use Ubuntu on ZFS + Incus cluster. What I look at is IncusOS: a radically new approach to base cluster OS: no SSH, no configuration. So far it looks too radical, but eventually I see that as the only way to go for somebody who has a "zoo" of servers behind Tailscale: just base OS which upgrades safely, immutable and encrypted, without any unique configuration. The vision looks beautiful.
I run roughly 30 PVE hosts across several customers (all ex-VMware). Few more to migrate.
You can migrate a three node cluster from VMware to PVE using the same hardware if you have a proper n+1 cluster.
iSCSI SANs don't (yet) do snapshots on PVE. I did take a three node Dell + flash SAN and an additional temporary box with rather a lot of RAM and disc (ZFS) and took the SSDs out of the SAN and whistled up a Ceph cluster on the hosts.
Another customer, I simply migrated their elderly VMware based cluster (a bit of a mess with an Equallogic) to a smart new set of HPEs with flash on board - Ceph cluster. That was about two years ago. I patched it today, as it turns out. Zero downtime.
PVE's high availability will auto evacuate a box when you put it into maintenance mode, so you get something akin to VMware's DRS out of the box, for free.
PDM is rather handy for the likes of me that have loads of disparate systems down the end of VPNs. You do have to take security rather seriously and it has things like MFA built in out of the box, as does PVE itself.
PVE and PDM support ACME too and have done for years. VMware ... doesn't.
I could go on somewhat about what I think of "Enterprise" with a capital E software. I won't but I was a VMware fanboi for over 20 years. I put up with it now. I also look after quite a bit of Hyper-V (I was clearly a very bad boy in a former life).
VE can be a cluster of nodes that you can still manage via the same UI. ESXi cant do that, ESXi UI is a single node, and not even everything that a single node can do with vCenter added.
I've heard good things about XCP-ng as well and tried it out at home and proxmox seems much easier to use out of the box. Not saying XCP-ng is bad just that it wasn't as intuitive to me as proxmox was when we were moving away from vmware
Ex XCP-ng user here. The web management portal requires Xen Orchestra and needs to be installed as a seperate VM which can be irritating, with a seperate paid license. Proxmox has a web GUI natively on install which is super convenient and pretty much free for 90% of use cases.
Yup, I have two xen orchestras running on different vm clusters in different DCs managing about 8 pools (some on all the time, some in vehicles which are sometimes on, sometimes off), all open source, works well enough.
I don't change the pools enough to make it worth automating the management.
I hope this is a signal that a third cloud option, BYOC (build your own cloud), is finally becoming practical. Yes, the physical management of racks is a massive part of managing a cloud but the software stack is honestly why AWS and the like are winning much of the time, at least for the small use cases I have been a part of. I priced out some medium servers and the cost of buying enough for load plus extras for fail over, and host them, was -way- under AWS and other cloud vendors (these were GPU loads) but the management of them was the issue. 'just spin up an instance...' is such a massive enabler for ideas. Something that gives me a viable software stack to build my own cloud on easily is a huge win for abandoning the major cloud vendors. Keep it coming!
Just migrated from xcp-ng 7 to Proxmox 9.1 for a client this week.
Honestly the whole process was incredibly smooth, loving the web management, native ZFS. Wouldn't consider anything else as a type 1 hypervisor at this stage - and really unless I needed live VM migrations I can't see a future where I'd need anything else.
Managed to get rid of a few docker cloud VPS servers and my TrueNAS box at the same time.
I'd prefer if it was BSD based, but I'm just getting picky now.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 57.7 ms ] threadI've kind of wanted to build a three node cluster with some low end stuff to expand my knowledge of it. Now they have a datacenter controller. I'd need to build twice the nodes.
Question: Does anyone know large businesses that utilize proxmox for datacenter operations?
Inside the Modern Data Center! SuperClusters at Applied Digital https://youtu.be/zcwqTkbaZ0o?si=V2uPScjyN_sJcIh7&t=696
You can set up a cluster to play with multiple nodes without the just-announced PDM 1.0. Or you can use PDM to manage three stand alone nodes.
If you want to do both, perhaps a 3-node cluster plus a 1-node stand alone with a PDM 'overlay'. So just a +1 versus a 2x.
You can migrate a three node cluster from VMware to PVE using the same hardware if you have a proper n+1 cluster.
iSCSI SANs don't (yet) do snapshots on PVE. I did take a three node Dell + flash SAN and an additional temporary box with rather a lot of RAM and disc (ZFS) and took the SSDs out of the SAN and whistled up a Ceph cluster on the hosts.
Another customer, I simply migrated their elderly VMware based cluster (a bit of a mess with an Equallogic) to a smart new set of HPEs with flash on board - Ceph cluster. That was about two years ago. I patched it today, as it turns out. Zero downtime.
PVE's high availability will auto evacuate a box when you put it into maintenance mode, so you get something akin to VMware's DRS out of the box, for free.
PDM is rather handy for the likes of me that have loads of disparate systems down the end of VPNs. You do have to take security rather seriously and it has things like MFA built in out of the box, as does PVE itself.
PVE and PDM support ACME too and have done for years. VMware ... doesn't.
I could go on somewhat about what I think of "Enterprise" with a capital E software. I won't but I was a VMware fanboi for over 20 years. I put up with it now. I also look after quite a bit of Hyper-V (I was clearly a very bad boy in a former life).
There seems to be a mechanism for that since version 9.0 (August 2025), does that not do what you need?
If it scales and the proxmox team can grow their support organization, they’ll have a real shot at capturing significant vmware marketshare.
Proxmox Datacenter Manager = VMware vcenter
Proxmox VE = VMware ESXi
VE can be a cluster of nodes that you can still manage via the same UI. ESXi cant do that, ESXi UI is a single node, and not even everything that a single node can do with vCenter added.
Proxmox VE is both ESXi and some/most of vCenter.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCP-ng
(There's also OpenStack.)
[0] https://github.com/TritonDataCenter/triton
[1] https://docs.smartos.org/
Xen Orchestra appears to be open source:
* https://github.com/vatesfr/xen-orchestra
* https://docs.xen-orchestra.com/installation#from-the-sources
See also perhaps:
* https://github.com/ronivay/XenOrchestraInstallerUpdater
* https://hub.docker.com/r/ronivay/xen-orchestra
* Via: https://forums.lawrencesystems.com/t/how-to-build-xen-orches...
I don't change the pools enough to make it worth automating the management.
Though I dont quite get the requirement for a hardware server, wouldn't it make much more sense to run this in a VM? Or is this just worded poorly?
Some instructions for Windows 11: https://kubevirt.io/2022/KubeVirt-installing_Microsoft_Windo...
> Off-site replication of guests for manual recovery in case of datacenter failure.
which would've been an actual killer feature
Honestly the whole process was incredibly smooth, loving the web management, native ZFS. Wouldn't consider anything else as a type 1 hypervisor at this stage - and really unless I needed live VM migrations I can't see a future where I'd need anything else.
Managed to get rid of a few docker cloud VPS servers and my TrueNAS box at the same time.
I'd prefer if it was BSD based, but I'm just getting picky now.