What are you using Proxmox for?

[Quartermaster]

I've seen some references here that Proxmox is running the majority of STH virtualised infrastructure (Impressive, is this still the case, @Patrick ?)

It's a long time overdue, but I'm looking into Proxmox as a replacement for ESXi on 4 reasonably grunty (E-2278/128GB/8x3.84TB SSD) nodes (and growing) across my colo & homelab environments, as VMware feels to be moving more and more away from what I need. The idea of going completely open source is also awesome.

My use case is not mission critical at all, really just a playground for experimentation and self-hosting simple services in VMs and/or containers (Portainer on Debian) along with other random things (bitcoin node, archiveteam warrior) etc - However reliability is an important factor for my sanity, I'm not looking to make the move if it's going to be something I need to constantly patch or screw around with - I'd rather be focusing that time higher up in the stack.

I'm interested in what others using Proxmox are doing with it? If you made the jump from VMware, what was the biggest deciding factor? Are you using the enterprise repo for 'more tested' patches than the non-subscription repo?

Thanks in advance for your feedback, it's greatly appreciated!

 

[vudu]

The biggest deciding factor? Opensource. As in, likely more in charge of my IT destiny. Sharing of knowledge. Web interface, no proprietary app. + cli, ssh and management via Ansible. Typically using non-subscription. Seems mostly adequate, and of course its Debian. Debian = Options, mostly without restriction.

We run Win Servers virtualised in production for paying customers and have done for more than a decade. ZFS and the ability to rollback crypto infected Win servers in literally minutes instead of hours is a game changer. Because... Users. Builtin backup restore, rivals Shadow Protect with caveats ie. ZFS provides incremental.

From a non-production perspective, miles of options. KVM, LXD, QCOW, RAW. Build on test on TEST zfs send receive to production.

Clustering, Paid support...etc. Good luck in your journey. You've asked the question. Its now only a process.

 

[Patrick]

Yes. There are still a few bits that do not use Proxmox VE to host. An example is that AWS Route 53 handles DNS. Mailchimp handles our newsletter, and bits like that we are not hosting directly. In fact, we actually have Proxmox VE nodes now that are basically just being used as ZFS storage servers for NFS and other services.

 

[WANg]

I've seen some references here that Proxmox is running the majority of STH virtualised infrastructure (Impressive, is this still the case, @Patrick ?)

It's a long time overdue, but I'm looking into Proxmox as a replacement for ESXi on 4 reasonably grunty (E-2278/128GB/8x3.84TB SSD) nodes (and growing) across my colo & homelab environments, as VMware feels to be moving more and more away from what I need. The idea of going completely open source is also awesome.

My use case is not mission critical at all, really just a playground for experimentation and self-hosting simple services in VMs and/or containers (Portainer on Debian) along with other random things (bitcoin node, archiveteam warrior) etc - However reliability is an important factor for my sanity, I'm not looking to make the move if it's going to be something I need to constantly patch or screw around with - I'd rather be focusing that time higher up in the stack.

I'm interested in what others using Proxmox are doing with it? If you made the jump from VMware, what was the biggest deciding factor? Are you using the enterprise repo for 'more tested' patches than the non-subscription repo?

Thanks in advance for your feedback, it's greatly appreciated!

Well, I am standing up a t740 thin client (Ryzen V1756B+64GB DDR4) with Proxmox 6.2 to replace my t730 (RX427BB+32GB DR3) running VMWare 6.5U3. I already set it up and migrated some of the VMs to the onboard datastore, but those will be moved to iSCSI in a bit.

There are several reasons to run Proxmox instead of ESXi, namely:

a) It's essentially Debian Linux underneath

If you are cool with Ubuntu or Deb, it's pretty straightforward. Although it did consume some CentOS/RHEL stuff like using LVMs...which makes admin on them...not so fun. Most Deb/Ubu distributions will not force LVM on you.

b) Better hardware support (especially for the older stuff).

Some hardware support was dropped during the VMKLinux -> VMware Native driver move - it was depreciated in 6, and removed entirely in 7. Some manufacturers will deliberately drop features to force an upgrade (i.e. SRIOV support dropped in Mellanox CX3 VPI cards for the ESX native drivers). If you want the hardware to stick around for a while, Proxmox is the better way.

c) Drag and drop compatibility with KVM/libvirt stuff.

Slightly less work than rewriting your VMX files to work with KVM.

I use mine as my issue repro lab and mostly for testing out stuff like NetApp Ontap 7-mode in VMs, or messing with Juniper Olive VMs. It's reasonably reliable, but then the question of reliability is...relative, really.