# Proxmox



## Mun (Feb 1, 2014)

Is proxmox any good? Do you think it would be better then Vmware ESXI? Give me some feedback of the good bad and ugly please.

Mun


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## k0nsl (Feb 1, 2014)

A lot more lightweight than Vmware ESXI, in my opinion, and is very easy to work with.

I do not have great experience with Vmware ESXI, but I do use Proxmox on two servers (so far).


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## Wintereise (Feb 1, 2014)

ESXi if you need to be complaint to a boatload pointless certifications.

In other drawbacks, it can't do NAT (without you setting up a openvswitch / opencontrail / vyatta / quagga routing vm), and it won't do any software raid. It's also closed-source software, if you happen to be an open-sores fanatic.

For commercial usage, you'll need a license from VMWare, and those are anything but cheap.

Proxmox will likely be easier to deal with since it's more intended to singular consumers from what it looks like.


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## dabtech (Feb 1, 2014)

I don't use Proxmox for anything where I'm selling to consumers, so I have no experience with automation with any billng systems or anything, but I'm currently running a 4 node cluster over OpenVPN using Proxmox for my organizations servers, about 30 or so vm's. So far it's proven quite nice. I've never used ESXI for anything serious, so I don't have can't offer any direct comparisons.

I especially like the fact that Proxmox is Debian based, which is my distro of choice and the one I'm most familiar with. As k0nsl says, it's a nice lightweight virtual environment that so far has proven very nice for my needs.

I NAT a few vm's via a host bridge and iptables. Wintereise, were you referring to Proxmox itself setting up NAT automagically? I have no experience with ESXI, like I said, so I may be missing a feature you're referring to ESXI offers.


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## Wintereise (Feb 1, 2014)

dabtech said:


> I don't use Proxmox for anything where I'm selling to consumers, so I have no experience with automation with any billng systems or anything, but I'm currently running a 4 node cluster over OpenVPN using Proxmox for my organizations servers, about 30 or so vm's. So far it's proven quite nice. I've never used ESXI for anything serious, so I don't have can't offer any direct comparisons.
> 
> I especially like the fact that Proxmox is Debian based, which is my distro of choice and the one I'm most familiar with. As k0nsl says, it's a nice lightweight virtual environment that so far has proven very nice for my needs.
> 
> I NAT a few vm's via a host bridge and iptables. Wintereise, were you referring to Proxmox itself setting up NAT automagically? I have no experience with ESXI, like I said, so I may be missing a feature you're referring to ESXI offers.


> In other drawbacks, it can't do NAT (without you setting up a openvswitch / opencontrail / vyatta / quagga routing vm), and it won't do any software raid. It's also closed-source software, if you happen to be an open-sores fanatic.

This was said about ESXi, not Proxmox, actually. Apologies if it seemed otherwise.


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## dabtech (Feb 1, 2014)

Ah, gotcha. Sorry about that, I misread.


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## mtwiscool (Feb 1, 2014)

i wish that proxmox had a user cp then i would use it for my host as it's vary good


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## k0nsl (Feb 1, 2014)

In a way it already has that, if you set the right permissions (et cetera). It's very easy to assign roles for individual users / groups.



mtwiscool said:


> i wish that proxmox had a user cp then i would use it for my host as it's vary good


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## tchen (Feb 1, 2014)

Wintereise said:


> ESXi if you need to be complaint to a boatload pointless certifications.
> 
> 
> In other drawbacks, it can't do NAT (without you setting up a openvswitch / opencontrail / vyatta / quagga routing vm), and it won't do any software raid. It's also closed-source software, if you happen to be an open-sores fanatic.
> ...


The ESXi license is free. Yes, you need a license for commercial usage but that's still free. Technically speaking proxmox community edition also requires a license for commercial use although it's provided closer on the shrink wrap and doesn't require a VMware account sign up.


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## blergh (Feb 1, 2014)

Proxmox and softRAID is doable, but just not supported out-of-the-box.


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## Jack (Feb 1, 2014)

blergh said:


> Proxmox and softRAID is doable, but just not supported out-of-the-box.


It's quite easily done too  took me about an hour with debian install and installing proxmox.


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## tchen (Feb 1, 2014)

Jack said:


> It's quite easily done too  took me about an hour with debian install and installing proxmox.


I've been hesitant to try that with mine.  Any gotchas when doing dist-upgrades or is it fully transparent after that first bit of somersault bootstrapping?


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## Wintereise (Feb 1, 2014)

tchen said:


> The ESXi license is free. Yes, you need a license for commercial usage but that's still free. Technically speaking proxmox community edition also requires a license for commercial use although it's provided closer on the shrink wrap and doesn't require a VMware account sign up.


Depends on what features you'd want. If I wanted to sell VMs off ESXi, I'd want vCenter management along with DRS/HA/VCB features, none of which are free.


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## concerto49 (Feb 1, 2014)

You guys should watch the Microsoft videos and how they position hyperv as a better alternative for a lower price


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## tchen (Feb 1, 2014)

Wintereise said:


> Depends on what features you'd want. If I wanted to sell VMs off ESXi, I'd want vCenter management along with DRS/HA/VCB features, none of which are free.


Fair enough.  Although if I wanted to sell under Proxmox, and I had already spent the money for the SAN required for HA, along with the fencing devices, I'd probably want to buy the VE Enterprise repo subscription too   Besides, I'm still waiting for DRS/VCB like things on Proxmox though 

My personal cluster is running Proxmox just in case you think I'm just dissing it.  The only gripe I have with ESXi is the latest 5.5 change to the v10 format.  They haven't updated the free vSphere client to be compatible so you're stuck on v8 - which still runs fine - but lacks a few new features like fully working nested virt.  I needed KVM for testing so I made the switch.  Coming from a ESXi lab to Proxmox, I miss the resource pooling controls.  But other than that, being free of whitebox hardware tracking is a godsend - i managed to resurrect some really old boxes and join it to the PVE cluster for shits and giggles.


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## maounique (Feb 1, 2014)

tchen said:


> I've been hesitant to try that with mine.  Any gotchas when doing dist-upgrades or is it fully transparent after that first bit of somersault bootstrapping?


Lately I am always installing debian first and then adding Proxmox layer over it.

I can say I never had issues with it, only one install has hardware raid, the rest software, all apt-gets working as they should, I also install quite a few other packages, for example, on the home server with E-350 i put on even cmus for radio streaming, as well as bluetooth support.


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## splitice (Feb 2, 2014)

I have run proxmox on all my dedi's used for web serving / mail / general purposes. Recently ive started moving away from it to DigitalOcean but that is not a reflection on Proxmox which is great software.

I know I had some issues with IPv6 & OpenVZ. I am not sure if support has since been added.


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## Cloudrck (Feb 2, 2014)

I've not used Vmware ESXI, but I do like Proxmox, especially since the new 3.1 update. As I've said before, Proxmox doesn't hold your hand, so it may take some tweaking to make it fit into your deployment. It's meant more as a platform to build upon and create/write your own modules or functionality. It's stable, even without the _enterprise_ repository subscription.


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## Mun (Feb 3, 2014)

Alright, I'll give it a try 

Mun


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## jvkz (May 24, 2014)

We have servers running VMware, proxmox and hyper-V

But our first choice is Hyper-V and second is ESXI and third is Proxmox.

Proxmox need java to install and configure vm's and on windows 8.1 it sucks to manage Proxmox server. VMware ESXI is nice, free and run great on E3 and even on old hardware.


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## Enterprisevpssolutions (May 25, 2014)

Proxmox works great for kvm and openvz they have the openvswitch added in the latest version so you can setup your networking and manage it. The client interface is the same as the admin but you have to set roles and permissions. Much less overhead than hyper-V and much easier to manage for configuration of vms then some of the others. We have been playing around with juju and openstack deployments recently.


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## Shivam (May 25, 2014)

Not sure i might try this sometime soon but meh i would look at reviews


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## bizzard (May 26, 2014)

Using Proxmox for a while. For managing VM's its a great tool.

Not sure how people using SolusVM and similar web interfaces will feel, but I am pretty comfortable with it.


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## splitice (May 26, 2014)

I quite like proxmox, sometimes I have experienced issues with the JavaScript not loading correctly but I understand that bug is fixed upstream now. Sadly it lacks proper IPv6 support (unless its been added recently), although its entirely possible to set it up manually. I hope IPv6 support comes soon


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## blergh (May 26, 2014)

splitice said:


> I quite like proxmox, sometimes I have experienced issues with the JavaScript not loading correctly but I understand that bug is fixed upstream now. Sadly it lacks proper IPv6 support (unless its been added recently), although its entirely possible to set it up manually. I hope IPv6 support comes soon


It does have some level of ipv6-support, so not sure what you're on to.


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## splitice (May 26, 2014)

Atleast in the past (its been atleast 6mo since I last played with proxmox) IPV6 addresses had to be manually added with vzctl the web interface did not accept them. Furthermore adding/removing an IPv4 would remove the IPv6 address.

That combined with lack of automation of the setup is what I was referring to.


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## earl (May 27, 2014)

splitice said:


> Atleast in the past (its been atleast 6mo since I last played with proxmox) IPV6 addresses had to be manually added with vzctl the web interface did not accept them. Furthermore adding/removing an IPv4 would remove the IPv6 address.
> 
> That combined with lack of automation of the setup is what I was referring to.


The only thing you need to do with v6 for OVZ is you need to manually add the V6 DNS for each new CT you create..The global DNS setting still does not seem to recognize ipv6 yet.. for KVM should work independently..

Also if you have trouble with Java loading you can try adding the proxmox ip to the "configure java" menu should be something there about edit site..


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## Bstephe (Jul 9, 2014)

Proxmox is awesome. We use it to virtualize our servers and works well. It works most effectively on linux IMO tho. KVM is also supported. Just my two cents.


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## hibernate (Jul 27, 2014)

It depends on what kind of virtualization you would use as Proxmox supports either KVM and OpenVZ.

My experience using Proxmox in commercial project is positive. We bought dedicated server, set up Proxmox 3 there and put all application components into different OpenVZ containers - Tomcat, PostgreSQL, Couchbase. It is still running smoothly serving loaded social game where all of these usually demanded servers living nicely under it, we have never had a crash or outage on average hardware (Core i7 3770) . 

What I like there - you can quickly set up internal private networking between containers and establish fast communication between them.

The only issue I found there is configuring it to be in a cluster. I spent a week to set Proxmox HA cluster but eventually gave up.


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## HalfEatenPie (Jul 28, 2014)

hibernate said:


> It depends on what kind of virtualization you would use as Proxmox supports either KVM and OpenVZ.
> 
> My experience using Proxmox in commercial project is positive. We bought dedicated server, set up Proxmox 3 there and put all application components into different OpenVZ containers - Tomcat, PostgreSQL, Couchbase. It is still running smoothly serving loaded social game where all of these usually demanded servers living nicely under it, we have never had a crash or outage on average hardware (Core i7 3770) .
> 
> ...


Yeah if I recall Proxmox's HA availability requires some specific design specs and needs a ton of tinkering with. I know when I originally tried setting up Proxmox in HA cluster mode it required some specific configurations I didn't have available at the time (probably because it was two dedis from WSI).


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## hibernate (Jul 28, 2014)

Well according to docs and available manual that seems to be straightforward - start these and those, set firewall - but at some point during nodes communication phase responsible service hangs up and breaks whole node setup. Logs are useless. Hope next versions will simplify/fix that.

So basically I like how Proxmox team managed everything under Debian even I am CentOS guy.

I had an experience setting OpenVZ/KVM myself on CentOS however I had non stable operation, a lot of Kernel crashes on CentOS 6.x on few machines. 

I incline to think that's more hardware related but next time considering going Debian+Proxmox or some other solution I would prefer Proxmox one.


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## setupvps (Aug 2, 2014)

keep in mind that the free version provide you only with beta versions (rpm)


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