openSUSE Leap vs. Proxmox VE

OpenSUSE Leap is well suited for just about any Linux task. Especially I like to use it as Docker base image for my software deployments, because it has a wide variety of software packages available already precompiled and packages are well maintained - vulnerable software versions are patched in reasonable time. OpenSUSE Leap is rpm based system, and it wouldn't install Debian or other systems packages. If your software is not an rpm package then OpenSUSE Leap would not be suitable for your system.

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

• Maintenance of software packages using YAST
• Availability of patches when a vulnerability is discovered
• Distribution upgrades

• 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.

• Commercial packages not always available
• Stable packages sometimes lag behind the latest releases

Incentivized

• 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

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

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

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

openSUSE Leap has wide variety of already precompiled software packages in default repositories. It even has some specific packages in official repositories that are not available in other Linux distribution repositories. It is also very stable and reliable distro - we can predict when new versions will be released and when we should make system upgrades.

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

• More effective maintenance means a smaller headcount needed for running the production servers.
• The easiness of deployment means more time we can spend on software development of company-specific applications.
• Great community support and overlap with other Linux systems mean that an answer to nearly any problem is usually one google query away.

• 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