Proofpoint Email Protection vs. Proxmox VE vs. VMware vSphere

Well suited: Proofpoint does a pretty good job at protecting us from spam emails. I was able to block a lot of emails coming from SendGrid by blocking SendGrid emails with a custom spam filter. However, SendGrid has a lot of legit emails too so I was able to create another rule to allow those emails from certain people, then block the rest. That way business need was met but spam emails are blocked. Less Appropriate If you are trying to monitor internal to internal emails Proofpoint is probably a little over featured for that.

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

vSphere is well suited for multiple VMWare hosts and can be very useful in larger enterprises where vMotion is used to load balance and failover running virtual machines. In smaller businesses with one or two hosts then the features can be overkill. The addition of virtual TPM support is a very nice addition to provide vm security in a more Microsoft supported methodology.

Incentivized

• Spam - catches these emails before hitting the inbox.
• Daily digest - provides users with a list of the emails that were blocked and allows them to choose to release them if they are legitimate emails.
• Ensures that emails coming into our organization is safe for our users and verifies the email is coming from stated senders email server.

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.

• vMotion that provides seamless movement of Virtual Machines between physical hosts and datastores.
• Ease of Manage: vCenter provides very good management experience to the users.
• It provides hassle free upgrade of versions, which requires good planning.
• Easy to manage datastore, networks, CPU and memory resources.
• It also allows to convert the physical machine and bring it to vSphere Environment with minimum effort.

Incentivized

• Proofpoint could offer more frequent training opportunities to customers at all levels of expertise.
• Proofpoint can always continue to strive to keep its product a leader in the industry.
• Proofpoint's support site could be overhauled to provide a more logical flow.

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

• Allow enable EVC without requiring host shutdown
• More detail in recent tasks. Instead of just showing a task called "Reconfigure virtual machine" also have a link to more detailed information as to what was reconfigured, changed or removed.
• Allow searching tasks or events

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

We are constantly looking for change that will benefit our company. We are not ones to stick with a product simply because it is what we know, but rather looking for what fits us best. We can't imagine another product on the market today doing a better job of handling our infrastructure than vSphere.

Very robust and solid product in protecting our emails. The engineers who assisted with our implementation was very knowledgable and great to work with. Easy to use by end-users. Administration and management are also easy for IT. Great dashboard and reporting tools for business reviews.

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

Very useful for environments where space and energy consumption are issues and management is not very keen on upfront spending on hardware every time whenever requirement comes from any dept for provisioning a machine for their occasional use, easily can be done in case of VMware vSphere in few clicks. Backup, security, monitoring and management everything is covered but at additional cost.

Incentivized

There were no appliance errors or unplanned outages during five years of operation.

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

Most important thing is the performance of processing mails. Even in a complex environment the system keeps performing on a very high Level.

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

We use ProofPoint support quite often to fix issues and assist with setting up features and rules. Each time we have created a ticket, they have been very helpful and respectful. Each ticket has been treated with the appropriate SLA time and attention. We also enjoy the regular check-ins from the engineers when tickets are open but we get busy with other tasks.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I rarely ever have to contact support and when I do need to resolve an issue, there is always an abundance of kb articles and research information available that can help quickly resolve the issue. Depending on the type of support contract you have, you may get support from some offshore group in another country and this could be a little challenging because of the language barrier.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Just make sure that when you implement, that the person implementing truly knows what they are doing and has a plan of action coming in. Since our initial implementation using a consulting service, I have implemented a few vSphere just from what I learned at the initial implementation and use over time, and the person implementing really needs to know what they are doing or you will miss out on features that may help you down the line

We previously used halon anti-spam, which lasted us well until our organization really started to grow and it was not able to keep up with the amount of mail we were receiving. The support is also nothing compared to Proofpoint's professional services offering. Halon was also not able to have the complex rules that Proofpoint can offer.

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

vSphere has a lot more feature sets than Hyper-V but at a much higher cost of entry versus MS Hyper-V. I have not been able to play with Hyper-V as much as I would have liked, but the setup and ongoing maintenance seems to be easier in vSphere than with Hyper-V

Incentivized

The contract terms are very clear and can be updated as per the project requirement. Customer support is also included in the contract which help us to troubleshoot critical issues very easily. Training included in contract will really help the client team to empower and hands-on on the latest updates and enhancements

You can add a lot of agents to your environment if you need them. And you can operate hardware appliances and virtual appliances in the same cluster.

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

As I said earlier, they're always ready to understand our issues and propose the best and most appropriate solution for issues all the time. The security patches solution is accordingly to the business needs. Another scenario is their Knowledge Base where
they're many articles that help you in order to solve something which
is wrong.

Incentivized

• Having easy-to-reach backups of all employee emails has made Proofpoint worth it by itself. That plus the countless times that spam/malicious emails did not make it through to the intended person that could have potentially cost the organization a lot of money.

Incentivized

• 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

• Having vSphere helped my business quickly recover from a ransomware attack which would have crippled us for weeks if we were not virtualized. I think the ROI on something like that is immeasurable.
• vSphere has allowed my company to purchase bigger server hardware to host 3 or 4 virtual servers, which was at a cost much lower than buying 3 or 4 server hardware boxes, saving us thousands each time we need to upgrade hardware.

Incentivized