[nolok]

> nothing is quite as simple to start with as ESXi if you've never used a type 1 hypervisor before

Not sure about where ESXi is at lately on that level, but latest proxmox is really, really simple to start with if you've never used an hypervisor. You boot on the usb drive, press yes a few times, open the ip:port they give you and then you can click "create vm", next next next here is the iso to boot from and that's it.

Any tech user who has some vague knowledge about virtual machine or even run virtualbox on his computer could do it, and the more advanced fonctions (from proper backups and snapshot to multi node replication and load balancing) are absurdly simple to figure out in the UI.

I can't talk about the performance or quality of one against the other, but in pure difficulty to approach proxmox is doing very very good.

[mavhc]

also does zfs raidz boot in the installer

[MrDarcy]

Also does ceph in the GUI for near instant live migrations.