Great virtualisation environment built upon trusted open source technologies.
Updated April 21, 2021
Great virtualisation environment built upon trusted open source technologies.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Proxmox VE
We use Proxmox VE on our office servers to host virtual machines we use for our business and network operations. It's used across the whole business for a variety of tasks, including:
- ZFS data storage.
- Hosting web applications for internal use.
- Hosting client websites during development.
- Network administration (DNS, mail relay, log server, etc.).
- Automation of software builds.
- 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.
- 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 I've often seen outdated or missing information, and the whole thing looks like it could do with some polish.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.
- 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).
We've used VirtualBox on desktop systems. It's great for what it is, but it's a whole different ballgame to Proxmox VE. Proxmox provides the virtualisation, like VirtualBox, but on top of that you get a very well oiled management layer, storage integration, clustering, etc.
Prior to Proxmox VE, we did use some instances of basic KVM virtualisation. This is the same virtualisation technology as used under the hood by Proxmox, but without any of the integrations, management tools, and so on, that Proxmox provides. Moving from direct use of KVM, to Proxmox, was like night and day. Proxmox just makes it all very easy and so far, very reliable!
Do you think Proxmox VE delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Proxmox VE's feature set?
Yes
Did Proxmox VE live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Proxmox VE go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Proxmox VE again?
Yes