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.
$90
year & CPU socket
VMware ESXi
Score 7.7 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.
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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
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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.
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Community Pulse
Proxmox VE
VMware ESXi
TrustRadius Insights
Proxmox VE
VMware ESXi
Highlights
Research Team Insight
Published
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 Product A and Product B
Proxmox VE is a virtualization platform that provides a range of features and functionalities suitable for various scenarios. Here are some specific scenarios where Proxmox VE is well suited and some scenarios where it might not be the best choice:Well-suited scenarios:Virtualization of server workloads: Proxmox VE is well suited for virtualizing server workloads such as web servers, mail servers, database servers, and other similar applications. Its high-performance virtualization capabilities allow these workloads to run smoothly and efficiently.Hosting multiple virtual machines (VMs): Proxmox VE is ideal for hosting multiple VMs on a single server. It provides efficient resource management, allowing users to easily allocate resources to each VM.Clustered environments: Proxmox VE is a great choice for clustered environments. It supports clustering and can easily manage multiple servers, providing high availability and load balancing for mission-critical applications. Less appropriate scenarios: Limited hardware resources: Proxmox VE requires significant hardware resources to run efficiently. If you have limited hardware resources, it might not be the best choice. Simple applications: If you only need to run a single, simple application, Proxmox VE might be overkill. Other virtualization platforms or even a basic web hosting service might be more appropriate.
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!
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.
There are some odd issues with VMware's virtualized network drive (VMXNET3). On occasion, after a reboot of a Windows-based VM the NIC will fail to bind properly and network access is unavailable until an admin intervenes by disabling/re-enabling the adapter. While it's possible that our environment is a contributing factor, this never happens on VMs using Intel E1000 emulation, only the paravirtual NICs.
Logging is extensive but difficult to work with. VMware's solution is a product called Log Insight, which comes at additional cost. Fortunately this is somewhat mitigated by the extensive support documentation and robust user community, but in the heat of the moment obtaining the required detail can be a trying experience.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I rarely ever need support for anything VMWare makes, but when I do, the documentation available just in the free community is generally enough. It's extensive and the community is truly robust and active. And if you have a myvmware account, you can get support for your owned products from VMWare support by the conventional case/ticket method
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.
While Hyper-V also can work very well and can have licensing benefits, it does rely on Windows in order to run. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can add another layer of potential failure and might not be running on as low of a level as ESXi does. The footprint for Hyper-V can be smaller if the Desktop Experience isn't used for the hosts, but this is the default fashion that ESXi has been running for many years. VMware's support has always been stellar, and its documentation is phenomenal. Hyper-V can work as a virtual environment option, but ESXi has never let me down in any environment I have managed. I will continue standing by this product and prefer it over other options. It has proven itself time and time again over time as the defacto virtual environment hosting platform.
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.
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
Positively, it has saved us time in spinning up new servers for the different departments in our company. It is easy for us to spin up virtual machines with VMware ESXi and deploy applications at the drop of a hat.
Positively we are able to save space in our data closets as we no longer need to keep room for physical servers and workstations, allowing us to expand in other areas like networking equipment and physical backup solutions.
It has moved our business forward as we are able to migrate old servers and static workstations in the virtual environment allowing us to easily keep an eye on older applications and update/backup easily through VMware ESXi management console.
