HashiCorp Nomad vs. Proxmox VE

Nomad is well suited for organizations who wish to tackle the problem of cloud computing with as little opinion as possible. Where competing tools like Kubernetes limit the concept of "batteries included," Nomad relies on engineers understanding the missing components and filling them in as necessary. The benefit of Nomad is the ability to build a system out of small pieces with the cost of having more complexity at a system level compared to alternatives.

Incentivized

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

• Nomad is incredibly simple by nature, following the Linux philosophy of doing one thing great. That one thing for Nomad is job scheduling.
• Nomad is a modern tool, written in Go with a large community and maintained by HashiCorp.
• Implementation of Nomad is very simple since it is a single binary.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Nomad only handles one part of a full platform. Expertise and vision are required in implementing an entire system that is functional enough for an organization to rely on. This includes other tools to handle things like secrets, service discovery, network routing, etc.
• Nomad is delayed in some modern functionality, like features for service-mesh and open tracing. These features are on the tool's roadmap, but there's currently no native support. These paradigms can be established still, but require more expertise outside of Nomad itself.
• Nomad is not the leading tool for this space, and as such risks being left behind by tools with much greater support, such as Kubernetes.

Incentivized

• Can't manage ZFS replication or snapshots as easily as I'd like
• Encrypted disks aren't easily deployed in VMs
• Moving disks between VMs is not automated

Incentivized

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

Out of every product I have used for this, Proxmox VE is the most concise, clear, and functional I have ever seen. I continue to use Proxmox VE even after occasionally comparing alternatives available because of it's usability, design concept, and great support of features. It's very unlikely I will find a product that can even compete with Proxmox VE in every angle of what Proxmox VE provides.

Incentivized

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

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

They are fast, understanding, very intelligent, know their product very well, fast, responsive, and concise. Need I say more?

Incentivized

It worked, was easy and super fast to deploy, and provided everything we needed in a matter of minutes

Incentivized

Nomad's primary competitor is Kubernetes, specifically its scheduling component. Kubernetes is a much more complete system that will handle more things than job scheduling, including service discovery, secrets management, and service routing. There also exists a much larger community support for Kubernetes vs Nomad. One might say Kubernetes is the safer choice between the two. Kubernetes is the complete "operating system" for cloud computing, but with it includes complexities that are "Kubernetes" specific. The decision really comes down to a mindset of monolith vs components. With Kubernetes, I would argue you choose the entire system as a whole. With Nomad, you design your system piece by piece. There is no wrong answer.

Incentivized

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

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

• Nomad has allowed our organization to deploy quicker and more frequently with a lower failure rate.
• Nomad has brought in consistency from an operations perspective.
• Nomad's performance allows us to scale infinitely while providing functionality that reduces mean time to repair (canary deploys, versioning, rollbacks, etc).

Incentivized

• Proxmox has allowed to us to do more with less. We can invest in a single (or multiple if clustering) host with a decent specification, and run most of our infrastructure on it.
• Open source technologies allowed us to re-use previous skills and knowledge. There was very little onboarding required because we already knew Debian, KVM, ZFS, etc.
• Virtualisation has vastly reduced the amount of time required to maintain all our systems. Everything is so much more organised and lends itself to automation (with Ansible, in our case).

Incentivized