[zer00eyz]

I have been running proxmox at home for a few months now.

It has been, to say the least, an adventure. And I have nothing but good things to say about Proxmox at this point. Its running not only my home related items (MQTT, Homeassitant), it also plays host to some of the projects I'm working on (postgres, go apps, etc...) rather than runing some sort of local dev.

If you need to exit vmware, proxmox seems like a good way to go.

[eddieroger]

I think "adventure" is how I'd put it, too. Perhaps that which I found most surprising was the difference in defaults between the two. ESXi gave me what I considered pretty good defaults, where Proxmox were more conservative or generic (struggling to find the right word). For example, I was surprised that I had to pick an option for CPU type instead of it defaulting to host, which I would have expected. Saying that, I never checked on ESXi, but I never had reason to look in to performance disparities there.

Once I found the surface, I have really grown to like it, expanding my footprint to use their backup server, too. Proxmox makes you work for it, but is worth it.

[SpecialistK]

> I was surprised that I had to pick an option for CPU type instead of it defaulting to host

I believe the rationale for this is to prevent issues when migrating to different hosts that may not have the same CPU or CPU features. Definitely a more "conservative" choice - maybe it should be a node-wide option or only default to a generic CPU type when there is more than 1 node.

[rcarmo]

I’ve been doing that for almost two years now, including ARM nodes (via a fork). It’s been awesome, and even though I am fully aware Proxmox does not match the entire VMware feature set (I used to migrate VMware stuff to Azure), it has been a game changer in multiple ways.

Case in point: just this weekend a drive started to die on one of my hosts (I still use HDDs on older machines). I backed up the VMs on it to my NAS (you can do that by just having a Samba storage entry defined across the entire cluster), replaced the disk, restored, done.

[d416]

Your experience is very relatable. My first Proxmox adventure began with installing Proxmox 8 on 2 hetzner boxes: one with CPU, one with GPU. Spent two straight weekends on the CPU box and just when I was about to give up on proxmox completely I had a good night’s sleep and things finally ‘clicked’. Now I’m drinking the proxmox koolaid 100% and making it my go-to OS.

For the GPU box I completely abandoned the install after attempting to do the gymnastics around GPU passthrough. I like Proxmox but I’m not a masochist - Looking forward to the day when that just works.

[irusensei]

I appreciate projects like Proxmox but it must be also said that you can achieve same functionality sans the UI with tools available on most Linux distributions: libvirt, lx{c,d}, podman etc.

[RamRodification]

A big one hiding in that "etc" I think is Ceph. Proxmox has a very nice UI for setting it up easily.

[sunshine-o]

I would love to see a serious comparison (features & performance) between VMWare ESXi, Proxmox VE and let's say a more stock RHEL or Ubuntu. And maybe even include FreeBSD/bhyve.

Because yes, in terms of core functionality it should be in the same ballpark. And in terms of UI, Virtual Machine Manager [0] was not that bad.

[0] https://virt-manager.org/

[zer00eyz]

True...

And Proxmox is just skin on lxc and quemu/kvm.

I will say that as I have just started playing with the lxc api, having the Proxmox UI as a quick and easy visual cross check has been lovely.

Podman is an amazing alternative to docker, cant say enough good things about it.

[tlamponi]

> And Proxmox is just skin on lxc and quemu/kvm.

Not really, we have a full-blown REST API that provides storage plugins for a dozen of technologies, disk management, system metrics reporting, management of LXC and QEMU (as in full-blown LXD/Incus and libvirt replacement), which alone probably is taking up a third of our code base, to provide replication, live-migration, local-storage (live-)migration, backup management, HA, good integration into our access control management including multifactor authentication, integration in to LDAP/AD or SSO like OpenID Connect, software defined storage and network integrations, our own kernel, qemu and lxc builds, and hundreds of other features. Don't even get me started on the devs required on each project to continue integration and upstream development and provide enterprise support that actually can fix problems.

In other words, wrapping QEMU or LXC to provide ones custom VM/CTs might be doable easily, but that isn't even a percent of what Proxmox VE offers you.

If a thin UI around LXC/QEMU is all one would need to be competitive with VMWare, then every web dev would be stupid to not create one as a weekend project, but reality is that there's much more required to actually provide the whole ecosystem a modern hyper-visor stack requires to even be considered for any production use case.

[sureglymop]

Can also highly recommend OpenVSwitch and it integrates neatly into netplan.