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Azure Virtual Machines vs. Red Hat OpenShift vs. Proxmox VE

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Azure Virtual Machines

    Score8.1 out of 10
    N/AVirtual Machines (VMs) are available on Microsoft Azure, providing what is built as a low-cost, per-second compute service, available via Windows or Linux.

    $0

    Per Hour

    Red Hat OpenShift

    Score9.1 out of 10
    N/AOpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

    $0.08

    per hour

    Proxmox VE

    Score9.2 out of 10
    N/AProxmox Virtual Environment is an open source server virtualization management solution based on QEMU/KVM and LXC. Users can manage virtual machines, containers, highly available clusters, storage and networks via a web interface or CLI. Proxmox VE code is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. The project is developed and maintained by Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH.

    $7.50

    per month

    Pricing
    Azure Virtual MachinesRed Hat OpenShiftProxmox VE
    Editions & Modules
    3 Year Reserved - Burstable VMs - B1S
    $0.0038
    Per Hour
    Spot - General Purpose - Av2
    $0.005
    Per Hour
    1 Year Reserved - Burstable VMs - B1S
    $0.0059
    Per Hour
    Pay as You Go - Burstable VMs - B1S
    $0.0075
    Per Hour
    Spot - Compute Optimized - Fsv2
    $0.0104
    Per Hour
    Spot - General Purpose - Dv3
    $0.0125
    Per Hour
    Spot - Memory Optimized - Ev3
    $0.016
    Per Hour
    3 Year Reserved - Compute Optimized - Fsv2
    $0.0307
    Per Hour
    3 Year Reserved - General Purpose - Dv3
    $0.0369
    Per Hour
    3 Year Reserved - Memory Optimized - Ev3
    $0.0481
    Per Hour
    1 Year Reserved - Compute Optimized - Fsv2
    $0.05
    Per Hour
    1 Year Reserved - General Purpose - Dv3
    $0.0548
    Per Hour
    1 Year Reserved - Memory Optimized - Ev3
    $0.0753
    Per Hour
    Pay as You Go - Compute Optimized - Fsv2
    $0.0846
    Per Hour
    Pay as You Go - General Purpose - Dv3
    $0.096
    Per Hour
    Pay as You Go - Memory Optimized - Ev3
    $0.126
    Per Hour
    No answers on this topic
    Community
    € 90
    year & CPU socket
    Basic
    € 280
    year & CPU socket
    Standard
    € 420
    year & CPU socket
    Premium
    € 840
    year & CPU socket
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Azure Virtual MachinesRed Hat OpenShiftProxmox VE
    Free Trial
    NoYesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYesYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——Proxmox Virtual Environment's source code is published under the free software license GNU AGPL, v3 and thus is freely available for download, use and share. A Proxmox VE Subscription is an additional service program that helps IT professionals and businesses keep Proxmox VE deployments up-to-date. A subscription provides access to the stable Proxmox VE Enterprise Repository delivering software updates and security enhancements, technical help and support.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Azure Virtual MachinesRed Hat OpenShiftProxmox VE
    Considered Multiple Products
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Red Hat
    Chose Red Hat OpenShift
    HPE Ezmeral has been a complete disaster in our experience, especially when compared to Red Hat OpenShift. The platform feels clunky and unfinished, with poor integration across components and a clear lack of maturity that results in frequent instability and unpredictable …
    Incentivized
    Chose Red Hat OpenShift
    had troubles with the stability of the whole cluster system. Red Hat OpenShift worked from the beginning
    Incentivized
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    25 Answers
    97%
    Would buy again
    315 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    9 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    92%
    Delivers good value for the price
    22 Answers
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    268 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    9 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    25 Answers
    99%
    Happy with the feature set
    322 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    9 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    95%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    21 Answers
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    218 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    7 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    25 Answers
    90%
    Implementation went as expected
    255 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    9 Answers
    Features
    Azure Virtual MachinesRed Hat OpenShiftProxmox VE
    Server Virtualization
    Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Azure Virtual Machines and Red Hat OpenShift and Proxmox VE
    Feature
    Azure Virtual Machines
    7.6
    25 Ratings
    6% below category average
    Red Hat OpenShift
    -
    Ratings
    Proxmox VE
    7.3
    12 Ratings
    10% below category average
    Virtual machine automated provisioning9.025 Ratings00 Ratings7.112 Ratings
    Management console4.523 Ratings00 Ratings7.112 Ratings
    Live virtual machine backup6.521 Ratings00 Ratings8.012 Ratings
    Live virtual machine migration9.017 Ratings00 Ratings6.112 Ratings
    Hypervisor-level security9.017 Ratings00 Ratings8.011 Ratings
    Platform-as-a-Service
    Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Azure Virtual Machines and Red Hat OpenShift and Proxmox VE
    Feature
    Azure Virtual Machines
    -
    Ratings
    Red Hat OpenShift
    8.4
    324 Ratings
    8% above category average
    Proxmox VE
    -
    Ratings
    Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings8.6275 Ratings00 Ratings
    Scalability00 Ratings9.3309 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform management overhead00 Ratings8.3290 Ratings00 Ratings
    Workflow engine capability00 Ratings8.6262 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform access control00 Ratings8.3291 Ratings00 Ratings
    Services-enabled integration00 Ratings8.5273 Ratings00 Ratings
    Development environment creation00 Ratings8.6283 Ratings00 Ratings
    Development environment replication00 Ratings8.3270 Ratings00 Ratings
    Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings7.9284 Ratings00 Ratings
    Issue recovery00 Ratings8.1279 Ratings00 Ratings
    Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings8.5285 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Azure Virtual MachinesRed Hat OpenShiftProxmox VE
    Small Businesses
    Proxmox VE
    Score9.2 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Foundry
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Oracle VirtualBox
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    VMware vSOM (discontinued)
    Score10 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Private
    Score9.6 out of 10
    VMware vSOM (discontinued)
    Score10 out of 10
    Enterprises
    IBM PowerVM
    Score9.7 out of 10
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    Score8.6 out of 10
    IBM PowerVM
    Score9.7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Azure Virtual MachinesRed Hat OpenShiftProxmox VE
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.4
    (25 ratings)
    9.1
    (339 ratings)
    8.3
    (12 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.3
    (26 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.5
    (10 ratings)
    8.8
    (3 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (125 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.0
    (9 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (3 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Professional Services
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Azure Virtual MachinesRed Hat OpenShiftProxmox VE
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Microsoft
    If you want to host a dedicated Windows server on the cloud, and especially if you want to integrate it with your on premises Active Directory, Azure Virtual Machines should be your first choice. Obviously running Linux on Azure works very well too, but given Azure's pricing is not the cheapest, there are other providers out there that have a better cost-benefit ratio for Linux. That said, hosting Windows on Azure can be affordable (especially when compared to other providers) if you plan your licensing, topology, and application architecture correctly.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    Red Hat OpenShift, despite its complexity and overhead, remains the most complete and enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform available. It excels in research projects like ours, where we need robust CI/CD, GPU scheduling, and tight integration with tools like Jupyter, OpenDataHub, and Quiskit. Its security, scalability, and operator ecosystem make it ideal for experimental and production-grade AI workloads. However, for simpler general hosting tasks—such as serving static websites or lightweight backend services—we find traditional VMs, Docker, or LXD more practical and resource-efficient. Red Hat OpenShift shines in complex, container-native workflows, but can be overkill for basic infrastructure needs.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    We used Proxmox to implement private cloud services, for clusters
    of a small number of servers, from 3 to 11 with and without high
    availability. Allways with ZFS file systems, and we used to install the
    root pool in SSDs mirrored and use other pools with RAID 10 in groups of
    four, for the virtual machines and containers, for the backups and snapshots, we used magnetic disks with RAID 10, in groups of four. Do
    not use an even number of servers because does not facilitates the
    implementation of High Availability, because the corosync service must
    have an odd number of servers to detect a failed server for the quorum
    system. We used a variety of servers, from clone PCs with AMD Ryzen with 6 cores and 12 threads with 64 GB of RAM no ECC, to high end servers with 64 cores and 128 threads per cpu and 2 cpus per server, with AMD EPYC Rome or Milan, 2 terabytes of RAM ECC.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Microsoft
    • When demand is high, we scale the service out, eg During a Football Match.
    • When a football match is over and the throughput of data from OPTA drops we save by the service scaling back in.
    • Our App Service Plans along with the Clean C# code are lightening fast giving a good customer experience.
    • When producing the TV Guide information and a program overruns its scheduled time, a client can instantly be updated to the new programming schedule as our change is instant and its in the right place for all the clients to download and adjust their television guides appropriately to send out to the public giving a 24x7 uptime service that is precise and accurate and resilient to outages due to failover zones around the world.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    • We had a few microservices that dealt with notifications and alerts. We used OpenShift to deploy these microservices, which handle and deliver notifications using publish-subscribe models.
    • We had to expose an API to consumers via MTLS, which was implemented using Server secret integration in OpenShift. We were then able to deploy the APIs on OpenShift with API security.
    • We integrated Splunk with OpenShift to view the logs of our applications and gain real-time insights into usage, as well as provide high availability.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    • BackUp System, provides extensive propiertes and verifications. An exclusive server for BackUp Administration (PBS)
    • Hardware Customization. You can select several properties to adapt the hardware to your needs
    • Easy administration. You will be able to manage the server with easily accessible tools such as the web console and usage statistics.
    • Certificates Administration.
    Read full review
    Cons
    Microsoft
    • Pricing can be a concern if you are truly agnostic to which cloud you are building your particular solution in.
    • The UI, as is the case with any cloud provider, is crowded.
    • As with any cloud provider, it can be difficult to tune in exactly the right amount of servers for your needs...you might find yourself under/overprovisioning.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    • I wouldn't necessarily say there is look everyday technology transform. I can see a trend wherein Red Hat OpenShift is adopting all the new technology trends and helping their customers align with their priorities and the emerging technology trends. I wouldn't call out various scope for development every day. There is scope for development. It is all how the organizations adopt it and how they deliver it to their customers. I don't want to call out there is scope for development. It's happening. It is a never ending process.
    • At the moment, I don't have anything to call out. We are experiencing Red Hat OpenShift and we can see every day they're coming up with new features as and when they come up with new features, we want to experience it more and more. We are looking for opportunities wherein this can be leveraged to help our users and partners.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    • The web UI does not work as well on mobile devices. It is useable, but a mobile optimised / responsive UI would be nice to have. There is a mobile app, so that may alleviate this issue, but I have not yet tried it.
    • Support in the community forums could be better. There are paid support plans, but new users trying out the software will not have access to this. Answers to questions can sometimes be terse, and I can imagine this may put some people off.
    • The wiki is a bit hit and miss with certain topics. I've often seen outdated or missing information, and the whole thing looks like it could do with some polish. I'd love to see it opened up for the community to add to.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Microsoft
    definitely it will be renewed. considering the ROI and uptime.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    This is the current strategy for the company, most of the products in the organisation are aligning to Openshift and various use cases it support. Also lot of applications are being developed for AI use case, openshift.AI provides opportunity to host and leverage the AI capabilities for these applications
    Incentivized
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    Proxmox Server Solutions
    Proxmox VE provides the most capable, yet stable virtualization platform in the market today. Licensing options are also competitive and cost-effective for support, and support is extremely fast and knowledgable of getting issues resolved as quickly and soundly as possible.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Microsoft
    No VM console, weak management interface, changing CPU/memory is not straightforward. On the positive side, basic RDP functionality is good to have. As long as things are working, the ability to host Windows VMs is appreciated.
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    As I said before, the obserability is one of the weakest point of OpenShift and that has a lot to do with usability. The Kibana console is not fully integrated with OpenShift console and you have to switch from tab to tab to use it. Same with Prometheus, Jaeger and Grafan, it's a "simple" integration but if you want to do complex queries or dashboards you have to go to the specific console
    Incentivized
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    Proxmox Server Solutions
    The interface is easy to use for most of it, but still lacks screens for some configurations. Also, a few of the screens are not as intuitive as they could be. This is specially true with disk and network configuration, where some graphic/visual representations of the configurations would be very useful
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Red Hat
    Redhat openshift is generally reliable and available platform, it ensures high availability for most the situations. in fact the product where we put openshift in a box, we ensure that the availability is also happening at node and network level and also at storage level, so some of the factors that are outside of Openshift realm are also working in HA manner.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    Proxmox VE's ha-cluster functionality is very much improved, though does have a not-very-often occurrence of failure. In a 2-node cluster of Proxmox VE, HA can fail causing an instance that is supposed to migrate between the two nodes stop and fail until manually recovered through the command-line tools provided. Other than this, the HA clustering capability of Proxmox VE has proven to be reliable in 3 or more clustered environments with much less chance of these failures to occur.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Red Hat
    Overall, this platform is beneficial. The only downsides we have encountered have been with pods that occasionally hang. This results in resources being dedicated to dead or zombie pods. Over time, these wasted resources occasionally cause us issues, and we have had difficulty monitoring these pods. However, this issue does not overshadow the benefits we get from Openshift.
    Incentivized
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    Proxmox Server Solutions
    Proxmox VE's interfacing is always fast to load, both the Web interface and the command-line tool interfaces. Reporting is practically real time almost all the time, and you can see everything in mere seconds, easily able to identify if something is wrong or it everything is in tip-top shape as always desired
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Microsoft
    I give the overall support for Azure Virtual Machines a 7 because I think while the overall support do a great job there are still areas that it could improve on such as efficiency and speed. So while I only give it a 7 and it has some issues it is still better than the overall support at Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    Their customer support team is good and quick to respond. On a couple of occassions, they have helped us in solving some issues which we were finding a tad difficult to comprehend. On a rare occasion, the response was a bit slow but maybe it was because of the festival season. Overall a good experience on this front.
    Incentivized
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    Proxmox Server Solutions
    They are fast, understanding, very intelligent, know their product very well, fast, responsive, and concise. Need I say more?
    Incentivized
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    In-Person Training
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Red Hat
    I was not involved in the in person training, so i
    can not answer this question, but the team in my org worked directly
    with Openshift and able to get the in person training done easily, i did not
    hear problem or complain in this space, so i hope things happen
    seamlessly without any issue.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    No answers on this topic
    Online Training
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Red Hat
    We went thru the training material on RH webesite, i think its very descriptive and the handson lab sesssions are very useful. It would be good to create more short duration videos covering one single aspect of openshift, this wll keep the interest and also it breaks down the complexity to reasonable chunks.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Red Hat
    No answers on this topic
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    It worked, was easy and super fast to deploy, and provided everything we needed in a matter of minutes
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Microsoft
    Azure Virtual Machines offer unparalleled flexibility in provisioning, managing and upgrading the VM instances, both manually and programmatically. AVM offer very granular billing options and enables high costs optimisations (while still being costly). The other competitors I mentioned are very good at offering dead-cheap VMs. But if you need anything beyond that, especially for big computing, you need Azure Virtual Machines.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    The Tanzu Platform seemed overly complicated, and the frequent changes to the portfolio as well as the messaging made us uneasy. We also decided it would not be wise to tie our application platform to a specific infrastructure provider, as Tanzu cannot be deployed on anything other than vSphere. SUSE Rancher seemed good overall, but ultimately felt closer to a DIY approach versus the comprehensive package that Red Hat OpenShift provides.
    Incentivized
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    Proxmox Server Solutions
    Proxmox VE is cheaper than VMware, especially upscaling an HA architecture. Compared with other free or less expensive solutions, Proxmox VE is high compatible with more types of hardware solutions and more VM types. From my point of view, Proxmox VE has no competitor at the same price level, it offers the most complete and production-ready HA solution.
    Incentivized
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Red Hat
    It's easy to understand what are being billed and what's included in each type of subscription. Same with the support (Std or Premium) you know exactly what to expect when you need to use it. The "core" unit approach on the subscription made really simple to scale and carry the workloads from one site to another.
    Incentivized
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    Proxmox Server Solutions
    No answers on this topic
    Scalability
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Red Hat
    This is a great platform to deployment container applications designed for multiple use cases. Its reasonably scalable platform, that can host multiple instances of applications, which can seamlessly handle the node and pod failure, if they are configured properly. There should be some scalability best practices guide would be very useful
    Incentivized
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    Proxmox Server Solutions
    Proxmox VE provides everything you need to quickly add new storage mediums, network and local, as well as networking interfaces, such as using Linux standard bridges and now Open-vSwitch bridges which can be even more scalable than before. Proxmox VE 4.0 dropped support for OpenVZ in favor of the more well supported and native LXC and made an upgrade path to it very simple.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Microsoft
    • It's so easy to spin up new instances, that it becomes also to easy to have to many of them to manage. Many teams end up with a couple of hundreds of VMs after a short while, making the whole thing very hard to maneuver
    • Azure VMs are the next step for us to rely on Onprem servers, and leaving the management of the infrastructure to the professionals
    • The ease of use, is also important when our main focus is to deliver new applications and integrations fast, and not having to worry about infrastructure. We sell bottles, not CPUs
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    • That is a complicated question and one that's not easy for me to answer. There's a lot of factors that go into all of the stuff that we just don't have an easy way of measuring. And we realize that while we're implementing Red Hat OpenShift, we've tried to start measuring some of that stuff, but we don't have a baseline to go on. So it's hard to say. What I can tell you is general experience with the platform has been extremely positive from the development aspect. Teams have been very, very happy with the speed at which they're able to do stuff. They've been happy with that. The way it works in one environment is exactly the way it works in the next environment because we don't have configuration drift, that type of thing, and has had very positive impacts. But we didn't have a baseline to start with. So I can't talk about getting there faster or anything like that.
    Incentivized
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    Proxmox Server Solutions
    • Due to the open source nature of Proxmox, we have no licensing costs while training our employees
    • We've migrated 100% of our clients to Proxmox and have found improved uptime, and flexibility.
    • In the 10 years of using Proxmox, we've yet to lose any data or not be notified of backup issues.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots