Proxmox as a cost-effective alternative to VSphere

For the longest time VMWare has held the title “Virtualization Champion”. Being both feature-rich and affordable, offering free-entry trials and excellent support, the company has become synonymous with virtualization. But has the king fallen out of favor? Is VMWare’s time past? And, who’s to take up the mantel?

Winds of Change

With the Broadcom acquisition VMWare is no doubt changing – and many would say not for the better. What was once affordable is now becoming premium – only for those with thick IT wallets. The free trial has become a thing of the past – leaving naught but a hollowed-out shell of the feature rich system for trial-users. Upgrades are now being heavily scrutinized and only those with top-tier contracts or maintenance agreements are able to upgrade and download – even though older contracts stipulated support.

Maybe now is good time to reconsider choice in virtualization provider.

The Contender

Proxmox (and others) have waited patiently in the wings for their moment on stage. Free projects (like the similar Xen-based “XCP-ng”) have also matured in the open source community for years now, adding stability, documentation, and features. For those that just coming up in the small and medium business an alternate virtualization provider might make a surprisingly great fit. And for a price that is so much less then VMWare its almost embarrassing (or shameful).

Feature Rich

Offering Clustering, High-Availability (HA), shared storage, LXC containers, networking and firewalling, snapshots / backups / replication, intelligent role / user management, SDN, APIs, and more, Proxmox has become a open-source fan favorite – and for good reason. Just look at the list of features from the 8.3 version:

Useability

The UI is both intuitive and complete. On top of that you get a well documented guide (https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/), support forums (https://forum.proxmox.com/), and can subscribe to their paid support (https://www.proxmox.com/en/services/support-services/support) if you need someone on the phone to help resolve issues in the heat of battle or do a deep-dive on a particularly complex issue.

They also offer training and videos, but with its worldwide popularity as an open-source favorite, it has tons of Youtube coverage, alongside other web support forums.

Installation is a simple process. Download and burn a USB stick, answer a few questions, and you’re web connected in no time. The installation keeps the bare minimum for the initial installation, then points the user to a web-based URL to complete set-up – which is nice for those that don’t have deep experience running command line virtualization commands.

But Enterprise Ready?

Okay – it’s priced well – but there are a few factors that need to be evaluated to be considered enterprise ready – at least in my view:

stability – can it hold up to daily use and maintenance
maintenance – what kind of patches and support are available
scope – what size deployments are possible and are out in the wild

This is where the jury is still out. It pretty well understood that for small and medium deployments Proxmox is a contender. Once you start to need thousands of virtual machines or 24 x 7 critical support then things get a bit fuzzy. As a company, and community, Proxmox has certain become a favorite but until it’s embraced in full-force by a company or two, Fortune 500 companies will continue to be skeptical of the engine’s capabilities. VMWare is to virtualization what IBM was to computers in the 1970’s – a choice that is both expensive but trusted.

It’s up to Proxmox to determine where to go from here. Starting with a 24 x 7 support structure would be a great start. Business hour support is helpful, but not for companies that “follow the sun” and operate in global markets. These are staples of the very companies that can make Proxmox a leader.

Wrap