Proxmox 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
VMware ESXi
Score7.4 out of 10
N/A
A bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly onto a physical server. With direct access to and control of underlying resources, VMware ESXi partitions hardware to consolidate applications and cut costs.
N/A
Pricing
Proxmox VE
VMware ESXi
Editions & Modules
Community
€ 90
year & CPU socket
Basic
€ 280
year & CPU socket
Standard
€ 420
year & CPU socket
Premium
€ 840
year & CPU socket
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Proxmox VE
VMware ESXi
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No 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.
Network Development Manager in Professional Services at Webservice Solutions (Computer & Network Security, 1-10 employees)
Chose Proxmox VE
Based on my experience , I selected Proxmox VE because it offers a range of powerful features and functionalities at a lower cost than proprietary platforms such as VMware ESXi and Citrix Hypervisor. Additionally, Proxmox VE is an open-source platform, which means that users …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
DevOps Specialist in Information Technology at BEE by Growens (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)
Chose Proxmox VE
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 …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Owner and Lead Engineer in Information Technology at Binary Engine (Computer & Network Security, 1-10 employees)
Chose Proxmox VE
Proxmox emulates hardware exceptionally well. This makes migration easier between systems. Additionally, the licensing model is friendly and the system is quite featureful. On top of that, by having a common base (Debian Linux) we have access to tools without needing to jump …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
System Administrator in Information Technology at Mobiquity, Inc. (Recreational Facilities and Services, 501-1000 employees)
Chose Proxmox VE
VMWare pricing is steep when compared to the Proxmox VE licensing model. You can use Proxmox VE GPL for free to fully evaluate every aspect of it. VMWare also requires you to install software on your virtual machine instances to which you wouldn't normally need. Proxmox VE just …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Principal Security Consultant in Information Technology at Insight (Information Technology and Services, 5001-10,000 employees)
Chose VMware ESXi
After trying Hyper-V, Xen, Proxmox VE and more we ended up choosing to go with VMware ESXi due to the ease of use and administration for our consultants. This in turn keeps our clients happy by reducing costs and support times when needed. While Hyper-V came in close the extra …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Self-employed in Information Technology at Airside Networks (Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees)
Chose VMware ESXi
vSphere has been in the virtualization game for a long time. It's hard to overlook this fact as you compare ESXi to Microsoft's less robust HyperV, Proxmox's immaturity and lack of polish. VMware has made clear that virtualization is its blood and has done a lot to push …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose VMware ESXi
Comparing ESXi to the other big three hypervisors, VMWare ultimately comes out on top. Initially, we built our server farm on top of XenServer for a few years, since it was stable and everyone was already somewhat familiar with it. However, given the recent drama with XenServer …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Proxmox VE and VMWare Exsi are both server virtualization tools designed to help businesses create and manage virtual machines. Proxmox VE is an open source virtualization tool designed to work with popular Linux distributions. In contrast VMWare Exsi is a type 1 hypervisor, meaning it creates virtual machines by running directly off the hardware, instead of being an application running on the host operating system. Both are most popular with mid-sized businesses and enterprises, though Proxmox VE is more popular with Linux users.
Features
Proxmox VE and VMWare Exsi both provide server virtualization features, but they also have some standout features that set them apart from each other.
Proxmox VE is optimized for software development and can virtualize a machine with nearly any guest operating system. Additionally, Proxmox VE supports a variety of images, from standard ISOs to QEDs and VDIs. The open source nature of Proxmox VE also makes it highly customizable for a skilled development team. Proxmox VE is a strong choice for businesses that value flexibility and reliability.
VMWare Exsi provides strong support for businesses that need it. This can make implementation simpler for businesses that lack the IT resources to implement server virtualization technology on their own. Additionally, while VMWare Exsi isn’t as customizable as open source options, the customization options that are there are easier to use without a skilled development team.
Limitations
Proxmox VE and VMWare Exsi both offer powerful feature sets, but they also have a few limitations that are important to consider.
Proxmox VE allows for heavy customization due to its open source code, but it can be difficult to use for smaller or less skilled development teams. Additionally, implementation for Proxmox VE can be more difficult than other options, and support options aren’t as robust. Overall, Proxmox VE may be a poor choice for businesses that will need heavy support from the vendor.
VMWare Exsi can be used for software development, but it isn’t as optimized for it as Proxmox VE, so businesses looking to develop software on Linux host systems may prefer Proxmox VE. Additionally, VMWare Exsi doesn’t support as wide a variety of image types and guest operating systems as Proxmox VE. For organizations using an obscure image type or a less common guest operating system, VMWare Exsi may not be a viable choice.
Pricing
VMWare Exsi and Proxmox VE are both free server virtualization tools. Both vendors also offer support at varying prices depending on the needs of the business. VMWare Exsi also integrates with VSphere software, which businesses must purchase.
Features
Proxmox VE
VMware ESXi
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Proxmox VE and VMware ESXi
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
If you're looking for the industry standard in server virtualization, I would recommend ESXi. After decades of expertise in the field, VMware continues to provide a strong product, production-ready, with an easy-to-learn interface that allows for quick management along with less costly upfront onboarding and training. Grab the free personal-use license and install in your homelab to start!
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Resource management. The automatic load balancing works very well to ensure no host is taxed disproportionately compared to the others.
Templates and cloning. It is very easy to set up a template and spin up new servers based on a specific setup. This makes server management very streamlined.
VM management. The vSphere interface is very easy to use and navigate. Everything is responsive and it works when you need it to. The options are also robust while also being arranged in a straightforward manner.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
VMware ESXi can improve on the UI that is installed on the bare metal machine. The menus can be hard to navigate when looking for simple configuration items.
VMware ESXi can improve on the stability of their overall hypervisor. There have been a few times we had to reinstall due to corruption of VMware ESXi.
I would like to see VMware ESXi do better at adding more standard free features in their consumer version of VMware ESXi. For example, having the ability to back up virtual machines is good practice and something that would be very nice if offered in their free version.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It is critical to our business, what started out as a way to do certain functions, it has now become core to ensuring our product is available to our customers and reducing our costs to operate and reduce our recovery time and provisioning servers. Their support is great and the costs to renew is reasonable.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The interface is fairly intuitive for most things, and the areas that are a little less obvious usually have fantastic documentation in the online knowledgebase. In 3-4 years of managing our ESXi hosts, I think that I have only opened 4-5 support cases for things that I could not figure out myself or find answers to on the website.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Without the need to patch the servers with bug fixes and enhancements we whave not experienced any downtime with VMware issues. Even the bug fixes and updates do not cause of downtime as we just migrate the servers to the opposite node and update the one and then move servers back. Very simple and painless.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We do not notice any difference between a physical and virtual server running the same workload. In fact we can scale quicker with the virtual server than we can with the physical.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I can't say enough good about VMware's support team. To an individual they take ownership of the case, provide thorough answers, and follow up regularly. On one occasion, a problem we experienced with NSX Endpoint was escalated to development for a permanent resolution after a workaround was found. In my experience, most companies would have tried to find a way to close a case like that instead of taking it all the way. Most importantly, when production is down and every second counts, they VMware teams understand that urgency and treat your issue as if it were the only one they had to deal with. You can't ask for better.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Jsut read and follow anything your storage provider may require to allow the integration of VMware with storage operations, outside of that VMware jsut works.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
As long as you're using Nutanix AOS on Nutanix hardware and are paying their software support fees, AOS is a valid competitor to VMware and can save money due to not needing a license and having their server management system built into the base host management system. If you aren't using Nutanix hardware, however, VMWare is in most cases the best way to go. I cannot comment on HyperV, but most IT people I know either use it because they have to (most) or they like it better (not many).
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
it has been fair and easy to understand. I know VMware is looking at wanting to change from CPU to core pricing so we will see what that looks like when it happens.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We started out with a two-server cluster and adding a third or fourth is very straightforward and simple with no issues. You just need to be aware of the size of your Vcenter Server to handle the workload, but still the resources needed is very minimal
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
VMWare ESXi licensing is affordable for our business - and the licensing model is simplistic. Not like that of Microsoft with having to keep track of server licenses and CAL licenses for users.
VMWare ESXi also has hardware-monitoring built-in, so that further saves us money from having to be spent with another vendor.
As much as I hate the saying "a single pane of glass" does fit for this product. You can manage your servers, monitor hardware status, create and export backup snapshots, manage virtual NICs, connect to various storage devices. We're very happy with this product.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
