Exploring Proxmox from a VMware User's Perspective

Welcome to our second video, diving deep into VMware alternatives for your #homelab and your business. In this video, I dive deep into the world of Proxmox to uncover how it compares to VMware ESXi and evaluate it as a replacement from a VMware user's perspective. It's a long video, and a lot of planning, learning, and effort went into it, so let us know what you think!

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**TIMESTAMPS!**
0:00 Introduction
0:51 The history of Proxmox
2:25 Feature comparison of Proxmox VE
6:58 Comparing consoles
9:11 Comparing GUIs ESXi
11:10 Comparing GUIs Proxmox VE
16:11 VM creation in Proxmox VE
19:25 Can Proxmox replace ESXi?
19:55 What I don't like about Proxmox VE
23:03 What I love about Proxmox VE
24:12 Closing!

[Wampa]

I'm a sysadmin at a decently sized European university. While our large faculty server is stuck with ESXi for the near future (which I'm hoping to change), our smaller servers all run PVE. This includes our server, a cluster of several machines that deal with high compute power for AI and machine learning, a cluster that runs *several hundred* concurrent VMs for networking and white hat hacking exercises, and smaller roles too numerous to mention. I've never had a single "I wish PVE had x..." moment. The only thing that's a bit difficult to work with is the user and permission management, but it's not a deal-breaker.

As for LXCs - I'd rather have them than not. My home server has very little memory, and having my services run inside Debian or Alpine LXCs that each consume ~20 megabytes of RAM is pretty baller.

[MiroslavIvanovimbmf]

regarding to the cpu types, if you choose "x86-64-v2-AES" you can live migrate VMs between Intel and AMD physical CPUs. :)

[YashPokharel]

What proxmox devs are doing is little different, it is a place where all the opensource virtualization technology meets.
Yes, it might not be general user intiuitive, but it provides well on core virtualization.
And as a linux nerd I love it.

[itx]

LXC containers are one of the main reasons I use Proxmox. They are extremely lightweight and fulfill all my requirements in my homelab. Compared to traditional VMs (Virtual Machines), their resource footprint is significantly lighter. I have only 16 threads available on my CPU, which means I need to be particularly cautious with thread reservation. LXC containers, on the other hand, offer great flexibility in terms of resource usage. I really love Proxmox and plan to continue using it in the future.

[sebastianslapek]

Life after VMware 🤣 perfect playlist for me

[piranha]

Re proxmox management from the console: The gui available via the web browser is only a think overlay over the command line tools, available from the command prompt. All VM and container related functionality is available from the CLI, and in some specialized cases, use of the CLI is still required to complete the task.
The big advantage of the GUI is that it is much easier to use. The "short" version of the help text listing only available command line options for "qm" (the VM management tool) is several hundred lines long, spanning many pages. Super intimidating for a beginner, but a life-saver for an advanced user, who wants to automate routine tasks.

[SveinErikLund]

I can understand the the immediate thought of Docker and kubernetes when it comes to containers, but remember that the container support in Proxmox actually started with support for OpenVZ containers, and moved to LXC even before docker even existed. Today I'm not sure that LXC makes that much sense anymore, but go back 10 years, and LXC provided significantly reduced overhead in contrast to a full VM. I've been using Proxmox since version 1.0, and with 3GB of ram on a server, shaving the memory usage by a few 100mb actually made a difference. As for the upgrade, it's actually not that hard to do. In fact I find it more unnerving to upgrade a vcenter, especially if NSX is involved.... Keeping my hands off the hypervisor and don't changing anything I've never had any issues upgrading a Proxmox host. That's not something I can say about upgrades of ESXi hosts...

[LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

Good video, fair comparison, and good points, especially around the major version upgrades, such as going from 7 to 8.

[gg-gnre]

8:05 "all management needs to be done via web gui"
completely incorrect. Proxmox makes virtually everything and more available via the command line. "pct" program and "pve" prefixed commands, tons of them. You can enter hosts via the "pct enter hostID" etc
in /etc/pve/ all machines are available for config edit as well

[khzomkx]

I'm still on the fence as to which hypervisor to migrate to, so I appreciate the videos. However, I wanted to say that I appreciate the presentation style of these comparison videos. I've watched both, and they are fantastic examples of how to do an X vs Y comparison. Nice work!

[dvnxwuq]

thank for the video.
As a linux nerd I say yes to a full featured gui with all options but a fallback to a shell for scripting helpfull tools is a great thing.
Converting VM to proxmox works with simple scripts but every Vm should be testet after a transfer.

[haraldludwig]

I haven´t made any experience on EXI because as a non professional user I don´t want to pay monthly for a Virtualization. I am running a mac mini but sometimes I have to use a Windows machine and I love Linux. Parallels for mac is so expensive and so a bought a mini PC for about 200 € and can now virtualize Windows and several Linux on that machine by using proxmox. Although I am 71 years old I was able to manage all this because there is a great community supporting proxmox users. And you will find big help on Youtube also. I think proxmox is a good software and free to use.

[ivanmaglica]

Hi, it's important to emphasize that Proxmox leverages KVM for VM functionality. Great video, keep on home-labing!

[ivanmaglica]

LXC have a lot of uses. It's basically for services that would best be run on bare metal, but you don't want to pollute host OS with it (samba server, nfs, ..)

[carlostavaresjr]

As you just stated, the reason Proxmox CLI is minimal is the fact the CLI is debian with KVM enabled. I have Ubunutu servers with KVM installed making them TYPE1 hyperivosors and now I just manager them with their gui tools like Cockpit or Virt-Manager. yes I can get in to the hosts via ssh but I don't run additional services on the local host at this point and just manage VM's runing said services. KVM was designed to be open source and full customizable to your liking.

[leester]

Good video my dude. I would like to see a follow up video on clustering, vim networking, vm storage, virtual disks, migration, fault tolerence and "DRS".

[mlprd]

LXC is really nice to have, I wouldn't complain about it being there. If you need Docker or k8s, throw a VM with them in there .

[kadu]

Thank you for making these videos! My organization was just talking about this very thing, and this will help me explain options to my management team.

[chuckdarr]

would love comparisons with Proxmox and XPG-ng vs Virtual Center. Our VMware bill went from $132k/year to 1.225 mil/year and we need to find some alternative.

[andrewv]

I believe the reason Proxmox has the VMware features, the pvscsi, vmxnet3, etc is because if installed Vmware Player on a Linux host, it has to compile kernel modules. So they may have the modules precompiled and ready, not to mention there is Open-VM-Tools, which is an open source version of VMware Guest Additions for Linux. When the Open VM Tools became standard, VMware pretty much dropped support for their own proprietary guest additions for linux, especially for newer kernels. Maybe having these for guests is for compatibility should you wish to migrate from ESXi or any other VMware product.