Proxmox VE vs Scale Computing Platform

Proxmox VE is a good alternative to the most famous cloud providers. It's the top solution when you want to run applications on your own cloud in your house or on remote servers. If the company has a remote and in-house server with Proxmox VE is possible to use the same code and the same VM on both sites, this is not possible with the standard cloud providers. Proxmox VE is the lead application also when you need total control of the hardware, base system, and all the stuff that are hidden on standard cloud providers.

Scale Computing seems to be a good solution for small to medium size organizations. I can't speak to large organizations and how well it supports scaling with their resources. For our case, we considered VMWare, HyperV, Scale, and others. We were initially going to choose Hyper-V; however, with the rumors of it being discontinued, we with Scale due to its price and ease of management.

• ZFS storage out of the box. The integration with ZFS is fantastic. You can easily create pools to store your VM images and data on, and the Proxmox web UI provides an easy way to check drive health, ZFS scrub status, etc.
• Great web UI. Practically everything configurable is available to do so from the web user interface. You'll rarely need to drop to the command line for administrative tasks, unless you want to, in which case you can do that too. The UI also provides graphs and visualisations to help you keep check of how everything is performing.
• Easy to setup a high availability cluster. Although Proxmox VE works perfectly well on a single server, you can also install it on multiple hosts and setup a cluster.
• Uses a Debian core system with an Ubuntu based kernel. This means everything to do with the base operating system is tried and trusted. We use a lot of Debian and Ubuntu installs, so having this run underneath Proxmox VE was an added bonus for us.

• Customer support and service is outstanding.
• Updates and upgrades are hassle-free with no downtime.
• No need to worry about hardware, BIOS, drivers, firmware.
• Outstanding handling of snapshots with thousands of snapshots possible with almost no disk cost and no IO costs. We snapshot each VM every hour and keep snapshots for 48 hours and 2 weeks.
• REST API can be used to create your own reports and scripts.
• The Hypervisor just runs. No downtimes since it was integrated 2 years ago.

• 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

• One of the things we have to do is manage a group of virtual drives that are attached to our Windows servers. With growth, we find that we need to increase the size of some of these drives. The method used by the HC3 system is cumbersome. I will say that I believe that this has changed in the latest firmware upgrade we did, but I haven't had a need to try it since we did the upgrade recently.

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.

Since I have had no issues with downtime; easier management of my cluster and the ability to lower the number of devices in my Infrastructure, I will gladly renew my support contract with Scale Computing HC3 and upgrade my equipment with them when it comes time for it.

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.

Everything you need to do is point-and-click easy. If you are the kind of admin who wants to edit every config file and endlessly customize your environment, then Scale may not be for you. On the other hand, if you just want it to work really well, and do what they told you it will do, then Scale is the ideal system.

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.

Never had an outage or an error. Once a hard drive failed, but Scale kept on working flawlessly without interruption.

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

Performance has been just as outstanding as reliability. I have never experienced delays in any aspect of usage.

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

Scale support has been great; the initial setup was done over a series of scheduled calls, they really hit the nail on the head with their onboarding process, and everything was written out so you were ready to go once your next call started. Kudos to the Scale Support Team and their continued service!

I did not do in-person training.

Because Scale is so simple, the training is just as quick and easy.

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

The implementation was very easy. We had Scale support on standby and they were ready and eager to help if needed. The process went so fast the employees in the organization did not even know it was done.

With an incredibly easy to use interface, quick setup, and wide support for different hardware we found it was the perfect lab tool for our department to build, stage, and eventually move VMs into production with.

To be honest hyper-converged infrastructure products dramatically show improvement from start up. Providing a single pane of glass management is important in any of these HCI products. I like any/all of the HCI products I've worked with thus far.

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.

HC3 is one of the best products I have purchased for our district. It is unbelievably reliable to the point that they shoot themselves in the foot on support contracts.

• It's a great solution allowing you to use all the server's resources on a single platform, saving energy, network resources and trouble of not having access to a troubled system. The ROI is immediate!
• Very secure system, allowing you to run your firewall directly on this system. Again immediate ROI.

• 0% downtime or loss of revenue due to downtime.
• The simplicity of testing backups in a live environment in the event of a technical catastrophe.
• Ease of mind and a lot less stress worrying about a raid system within a standalone server dying in the middle of the night.