Proxmox VE Reviews

It is implemented in several Private Cloud Data Centers, from 5 to 16 nodes, from 256 GB RAM to 1 TB RAM, all using Supermicro Systems, running SQL servers, Application Servers ( SAP, Prothevs and some tailored Apps developed in house ) VDI and Files Repositories . all smooth and trouble free .

With live migration, there is no downtime when any node needs service or upgrades. Plus, when I need more memory, I just allocate it; more disk space? same. It is possible to administer almost anything remotely, now it takes months till a customer needs a weekend visit to service something, before Proxmox, it used to happens once a month!

Live migration :

Is simplifies the daily work, and reduces the downtime to nearly 0 .

Clonning and Snapshots :

Verry useful for development testing and backup .

Histogram about i/o, memory, CPU and network usage :

Helps to find the issue when some VM are running in some kind of bottleneck .

Mostly simplify web interface, simple things like the use of right mouse button to change VM attributes, make it more intuitive, but it is just cosmetic improvements, the core functions are all there.

Version 6.x improved the support for Containers to the PRO level .

re than 10 years, since version 1.6 all the way to version 6.2 

Never had any issue with stability, even in the very earliest stages of development...

Not for now, the 16 nodes per cluster limit have been removed in the 5.x release !

Customer Service: OK, in fact the little we've used it, the site documentation was really good.Technical Support: Same as above.

Yes, Citrix XEN Server and EMC VMWare Server. I left Citrix for security, there are too many "black box" in the binaries that cannot be audited. In the VMWare case, for licenses politics, it uses a "per socket" schema that punishes high density servers with 2 or 4 sockets .

Is is the tool of choice used in the entire Facebook infra-structure, so it must be "at least" good enough .

The first test was a little complex, in the time of the 1.4 version, but since the 2.0 version it is extremely simple, takes less then an hour to deploy a node and connect it to an existing cluster.

The 6.x release made things even easier, most maintenance tasks are now in the web interface

I am an IT consultant, and I do everything myself (with my team, we are 4 people!)

Outstanding, worth every single cent spent on it!

The deployment itself cost nothing, it is Opensource software! The monthly subscription costs 17 euros per node, and it covers anything we needed so far...There are more options, but it is more then our customers needed until now .

Several, From Red Hat to Ubuntu, and everything I can find with a Google search, I spent 6 months with these research and tests!

The Facebook contract came well after this tests .

Do it! The simplicity will surprise you!

Private Cloud

The product helps me to use a group of servers and improves the speed.

The solution's most valuable feature is backups.

Proxmox VE needs to make a deal with Veeam. I was also unable to make version upgrades. I have also encountered backup problems.

I have been using the product for seven months.

I rate Proxmox VE's stability a seven out of ten.

I rate the tool's scalability a five out of ten.

The solution's technical support is not good. I find support through the internet.

Neutral

The tools' deployment is easy and I rate it a seven out of ten. It took two hours to complete. Install Proxmox VE on the server, then proceed to install the hard disk. After that, configure it for the work system and install the desired system. Finally, install all the necessary programs on the server. You need one resource to handle the deployment.

The tool's deployment can be done in-house.

The product is open-source and I rate its pricing an eight out of ten. You need to pay for support and it is costly.

I rate Proxmox VE an eight out of ten.

Private Cloud

The tool has very good performance.

The solution needs to improve its stability.

I have been using the solution for one month.

I would rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

The tool’s setup is easy. The setup took two weeks to complete.

I would rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case for Proxmox VE is for virtualization and a little bit of SaaS storage, basically for virtual machines.

Proxmox VE is simple to use and it is feature rich. The fact is that it performs,

The only issue I have with Proxmox VE is updating it. You have to manually update it or you have to have a way to update it automatically.

The main area for improvement is with the automatic updates, if it's even possible, even if you have to pay for the cloud services. Updates are very important.

If they could fine tune the updating process that would be good.

I have been using Proxmox VE for two years.

Proxmox VE is stable. We have a few issues where all of a sudden you can't update it, because maybe you have taken too long to update the repository. This is a concern for us. Like I mentioned before, the updating feature is very important to us because there could be some security issues.

There are a lot of actions that you need to do with commands, which have not been automated yet. I believe that with time it will be automated.

In terms of scalability, we didn't have any need for scaling because just the fact that you can put them in a cluster and manage one unit is a very good feature. I don't have to manage it individually, I can just put them together in a cluster and manage them for one single piece. I'm about to test the backup feature and also maybe upgrade it to the next version, which is 7.0. I'm expecting that there will be a lot of improvement.

Right now we have about six users on a project that I'm deploying. I'm still managing the project, but due to COVID it has gone on for two years, but we're just about to hand it over. Because of the COVID issue, nobody wants to come to one place to sit down and do anything. All of last year was just wasted, but this year we're able to do a number of things with them. The manual process of updating one by one is relatively stable. In the account, you have to centralize the management. You have to log in one by one and you can have a different password for for each one, it's not unified. They have not unified the authorization process.

One thing I have noticed is that because I put a password on one it is expecting me to manually put a password on the other node. I would expect that for better management you can have the same propagating password. Maybe there's a better way to do it, but that's what I have been seeing and I found that I have to be doing this for each one on each node. That is an issue, but so far it's been very good. It's been very stable. I never had any issues with it. It's cool stuff.

I  really like the software storage. I used it on one of the cloud servers that we set up and it's working very well.

We do plan to increase the usage in the future.

Proxmox VE is very simple to use.

The deployment took a long time, but it was not because of Proxmox. It was some other issues for other projects. Installing the Proxmox software is very easy. It just takes a day or two.

We did it in-house.

Our license is on a yearly basis.

There are no other costs, just the license fee and the license is flexible. You could decide to go subscription only or you could decide to pay for support.

My advice to anyone considering Proxmox VE is that they should study it to understand it, because it is feature reach, so you have to read the manuals. They have to read the manual and unfortunately the manual training level is on the high side, so for people who are experimenting or who are just coming into the free version, it might be a little bit hard for them. Proxmox should try and market more on the training side so users can speed it up and have a good adoption. I hear that people understand the product very well, because right now I don't think it has a rival. It's trying to beat the Oracle VM or the other VMs in the market.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Proxmox VE a seven.

On-premises

My company uses Proxmox VE for VDI, so we basically use it for Windows VDI, and a few of our Linux servers run on it.

My company has benefited from the use of Proxmox VE since it has helped us reduce our costs. Earlier in my company, we were using VMware. My organization's costs related to operations were on the higher side when we were using VMware, especially when it came to areas related to management and updates. With VMware, you need to have an active subscription to run a few basic VMs and other stuff, but on Proxmox VE, you don't need to pay for any overhead costs. You only need to pay for support from Proxmox VE, and otherwise, it is a completely free solution.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that my company gets to use the open-source version of the product while also getting better features like clustering and redundancy. Compared to the other products in the market, Proxmox VE has an easier setup phase and can be easily managed.

Proxmox VE doesn't offer a good interface for monitoring. From an improvement perspective, Proxmox VE can offer a better interface for monitoring. Other products like Nutanix offer better monitoring capabilities than Proxmox VE. Proxmox VE doesn't have any other product integrated with it for storage. My company has to look for products from other vendors to take care of the storage part in Proxmox VE. Proxmox can offer its users a storage solution integrated with Proxmox VE.

Feature-wise, the console was the only place where my company saw an issue with Proxmox VE. The console provided by Proxmox VE is not much of a console meant for virtual machines. With Proxmox VE, once you have deployed the virtual machines, you realize that the initial console is not very good, because of which the graphics may seem boring. My company also finds many compatibility issues with the tools you need to install for the virtual machines to work in Proxmox VE, like the drivers and other stuff. My company has to look into many logs and other sources to resolve the compatibility issues related to Proxmox VE. In Proxmox VE, my company installs ISO when the setup phase of a virtual machine is carried out. One of the problems my company faced with Proxmox VE was installing a server with MySQL since it didn't function as an out-of-the-box product, because of which we had to shut down the machine and go through a configuration process. The default processor provided by Proxmox doesn't work.

I have been using Proxmox VE for a year.

It is a stable solution. My company does face some performance-related issues with Proxmox VE, but I feel that such issues are mostly related to hardware and not the solution.

My company hasn't used the scalability options provided by the solution because our hardware is currently fixed. My company operates on an on-premises model, and I don't know how we can avail of the scalability options if we plan to move to a higher version of the hardware.

My company has only two servers running for Proxmox, but we have about a hundred VDIs or virtual machines that run on Proxmox.

I have experience with VMware. We had VMware in our company, which is only for service and not for the VDI part. We did not continue with VMware in our company because it was not an open-source platform. My company mostly prefers to stay on open-source platforms over paid tools.

The initial setup of Proxmox VE was very easy. With Proxmox VE, the installation, clustering, and configuration parts are easy.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. My company plans to deploy the solution on the cloud in the future.

For the deployment process of Proxmox VE, since my company migrated from VMware to Proxmox VE, we rely on our own hardware. The deployment process didn't require much effort. In our company, we were able to handle the workload related to the deployment process easily.

The migration process from VMware to Proxmox VE was completed in a period of 15 to 20 days. In my company, we had very little workload on VMware. To work on the VDI part in Proxmox VE, my company had to do a fresh setup, meaning we had to start from scratch since we weren't using it with VMware. After looking at the solutions available in the market, my company decided to go ahead with Proxmox VE.

It is an open-source platform.

As a part of my company's evaluation process, we tested VMware.

The solution's maintenance part was very easy.

I recommend Proxmox VE to others considering the online community support and because it is available as an open-source product.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

On-premises

We are using Proxmox VE for our internal services, we have a few virtual machines that run our mail servers, call center solutions, TDX, and other applications. Proxmox VE is a virtualized platform.

The most valuable feature of Proxmox VE is the speed. Additionally, I can modify the solution if needed because it is open-source and the integration of any kind of API and monitoring is hassle-free.

Proxmox VE can improve the management of virtual discs. For example, if my virtual disc is 200 GB and I want to decrease it is not easy. I have to do a lot of things to decrease the size of existing virtual machines. If the Proxmox VE team can make it easy for customers to instantly increase or decrease the virtual machine hard disc, it will be very helpful for me. However, the containers I can do it easily.

I have been using Proxmox VE for approximately seven years.

I rate the stability ofProxmox VE an eight out of ten.

The scalability of Proxmox VE could improve. The vertical scaling needs improvement. If the vertical scaling was better I could input the resources on the fly without shutting down the system. This would make it a lot easier.

We have approximately six technical support staff using this solution in my company. We plan to increase our usage of this solution.

I rate the scalability of Proxmox VE a six out of ten.

I have not had any issues that I would need to contact support about. 

I used Oracle Virtual Box and VMware prior to Proxmox VE. We choose Proxmox VE because of the cost savings, it is free.

Proxmox VE's initial setup of easy. I started the implementation process by selecting a location, installing the hardware and Proxmox VE, and then I made the cluster without the Proxmox VE. The last step was to implement my virtual machine. The full process did not take more than two hours.

I rate the initial setup of Proxmox VE a nine out of ten.

I did the implementation of this solution myself.

This is a free open-source solution.

My advice to others would be to choose simple solutions for only virtual machines with no extra integration of other features. This is an open-source solution and if someone wants to do something on the backend many things could go wrong. It is best to start with something simple, such as virtual machines with containers only. After they have had some experience then they can expand their knowledge with other solutions.

I rate Proxmox VE an eight out of ten.

On-premises

This is a free version of VMware and that's why we're using it. It does everything that VMware can do and it's more flexible. We were looking for a virtual solution and we're a startup, so the cheapest is best. We are customers of Proxmox and I'm the technology operations manager. 

The feature I like best about this product is the fact that they have independent nodes. Proxmox is based on KVM and essentially you could lose a node. All the hosts that are running are evacuated elsewhere in the cluster and away you go. I have reduced infrastructure and I'm familiar with it because at the heart of the hypervisor is Debian Linux and I'm a Linux administrator. It didn't require learning a whole new platform and it's so easy to use. Proxmox will be in my toolbox forever, I love it.

This is a really great solution and the more VMware raises their costs, the more appealing it is. I'd be very nervous if I were one of the big companies because you're going to have administrators like myself discovering Proxmox and the cost is zero. With this solution, when something goes wrong, you Google it, you figure out the problem and fix it. Of course if you're an enterprise company, that's something else.

The product should have more enterprise features, perhaps DRS. I don't think Proxmox has the ability to sense that a host is running hot and needs to be evacuated. So DRS, dynamic resource scheduling, is a feature that constantly monitors the host and if it sees a particular host taking up a lot of resources, it will take that host off and throw it on a different host in the cluster that's not running as hot and doesn't have as much utilization. It protects the overall cluster 

As above, I think the DRS would be a helpful additional feature.

I've been using this solution for six months. 

As long as you're monitoring your host yourself, it's a stable solution. 

I can't really speak to the scalability. I haven't looked into it yet. We're a very small company and we have about five people using the solution, all at the director or senior level. We have a senior application developer, and a director level manager who brought the product in.

Does a three and a half minute setup sound reasonable to you? When I first installed it, I thought there must be more to it. I downloaded the ISO onto a thumb drive and made it bootable. Then you boot the server, boot off the thumb drive. You have to answer about six questions and that's it. Very simple. 

My only recommendation to anyone thinking of implementing this solution is to read up on it, but give it some serious consideration because it really is a great product. In other words, don't let the freeware label scare you off.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

Private Cloud

I use Proxmox VE to host a domain control environment, a Windows server environment, and to host a few apps that I publish on the store. I'm also using it to manage clients' remote surveillance backups because I keep my clients' CCTV footage.

I set up an NVR environment, and I'm pushing traffic to my servers. I'm running a mini data center. It's doing apps. It's doing Windows Server Management for a normal environment. It's nothing fancy, but it's working.

I like that it's secure, and I find its Software RAID very useful. It's way better than the Hardware RAID I was used to. I'm really impressed by their Software RAID feature. 

Backup and recovery could be better. It's a bit problematic. If you're not well-versed with Linux, it tends to be a bit of a challenge when setting up and recovering. It's not really GUI-based, and if you're not a good Linux user, it becomes a bit difficult.

In the next release, I would like to have something like Hyper-V's Data Protection Manager, where you could do an offsite backup and keep a copy. I haven't seen that incorporated yet, but I'm sure they will do that.

I have been using Proxmox VE for more than five years.

Proxmox VE is a stable solution. I don't have that much money to buy new hardware or new servers, and I have more or less deployed it on the old used servers I purchased online. It's been a breeze. Until I make money to buy the high-end servers, I'm just purchasing used servers or end-of-life servers, and they're running. For a third-world set up, they're running well. For 25-plus years, it's been a good solution for me.

Proxmox VE is a scalable solution. When I get a new host or a new client, I'll probably buy a new server and add it to the node or the cluster. It's just a breeze. It's as simple as a click, and I have added it. 

I have about 20 clients. My clients are about seven schools, gas stations, coal, utilities, a bank, two small microfinance banks, and the government.

I am thinking of doing more. I am thinking of setting up a mini data center with it because we have done the proof of concept for CCTV storage. People don't have the space or the money to do their own backup and store their own footage. Part of my solution is selling them storage that they can retrieve from their devices. I store their CCTV data in my data center and give them a remote view. You don't need to have an NVR.

When I sell a surveillance solution, you don't even have to have an NVR. Give me a firewall, and then I will point your storage to come to my server. I'm the one in the neighborhood storing information at the moment.

The forums have everything you need. I haven't had any challenges because the forums are there. I have yet to get the paid subscription support. I have yet to find an installation that has given me a challenge that I can only resolve by subscribing for support.

I was using Hyper-V from VMware, but Microsoft kept crashing. It takes a lot of investment here in Africa. I need to invest a lot in power because master machines crash. Windows and power are not the best of mates. After that, I moved to Huawei Desktop Protocol and Huawei Desktop Cloud. That also had issues with the support and licenses. Then we moved to Proxmox, and it's been working.

The initial setup is straightforward. It was hard at first, but I went over the forums. After I went over the forums, I did the YouTube tutorials and videos, and after that, I managed my clients well without paying for a bit of support. Surprisingly, I have been running for about five years.

It doesn't take hours because I've deployed on two nodes, and I've deployed on three nodes. Currently, I'm running it on four nodes, and it's doing great. So, with every installation, I tend to get better.

On a scale from one to five, I would give my initial setup experience a four.

I had some support. I've got over 12 years of experience working with Twitter, Uganda. Now Twitter, Uganda is a multinational, and the rest of the group supports the partners. I've had a bit of guidance when it comes to switching, routing, storage, and databases. 

When I went out on my own, I used that background knowledge and the background skills I obtained through the years, and they helped me out. I didn't have any outside tech support to help. The tutorials were there, and the videos were available on YouTube.

I have a guy who does the power because he's got to stabilize the servers. Then I've got a guy who does the networking. He gives me the IP. He gives me the ports to connect. Then I have the guys who do the installation on-site, especially the Windows servers. I also have the Linux guys. It's a team of about four people. The rest are juniors or what we call apprentices. They help out here. I mostly use students to get the work done.

I'm definitely getting a return on my investment. I'm buying used servers, and I'm charging like I was charging for new servers, and I'm making a good profit on them. I'm repurposing servers, and I'm making a lot of money from repurposed servers using Proxmox, and they're running.

On a scale from one to five, I would rate my ROI at three.

Proxmox VE is affordable. It's cheaper than Hyper-V, Huawei Desktop Protocol, and Huawei Desktop Cloud.

I made a comparison with Hyper-V and Huawei. I bought Proxmox because it's cheaper and more resilient to our power environment. We have very unstable power in the country, so Hyper-V and sudden breaches in power were problematic.

I would tell potential clients about the ease of use. What's quite surprising is that Microsoft is going that way now, but these guys had that solution there back in the day.

Microsoft is doing Software RAID with Server 2019. These guys already had that solution back in that day. They're doing cloud spaces, but Linux had SAFE back in the day. 

I'll tell them it's a cheap option. It's a stable option. I know Microsoft has done a lot in trying to get stable, but it's an affordable option. It's a stable solution, and it just works off the fly like that. 

You watch the video, use a storage guy, have a power guy, and have a good networking guy. You could get the service up and running compared to having a Microsoft MVP somewhere in a corner or on-call somewhere.

The releases are killing us. It's like they keep releasing every year. I would wish for them to come with something very stable. They keep coming up with something new every six months because I think their release cycle is every six months. I'm trying to finish something, and they release something new altogether, and I have to migrate. I know the iterations are as minimal as possible, but it still has an impact.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give  Proxmox VE a seven.

On-premises