Proxmox VE Reviews

Proxmox is a virtual machine and container suite with everything in one place. It does not use Docker directly but uses a specific tool called LXC for containers. They also use it with KVM to offer customers a unified and easy-to-use graphical tool along with a very powerful command line suite of tools for visualization.

Proxmox is from Germany. It is a free product that has all the features, just like the commercial license. The difference is that the customer has access to additional repositories in commercially licensed versions. These include extra plug-ins and capabilities that eventually are used in a production environment.

The free or community edition has a complete suite of virtualization tools and high availability capabilities to provide a complete scenario for production, testing, etc. Proxmox VE is a very, very good product. Proxmox VE is a Debian Linux-based product that can be downloaded on an ISO archive or installed in a Debian Linux environment that the customer already has.

The solution's most valuable feature is that it allows customers to use the power of KVM easily. KVM is a very powerful and difficult tool to use, but Proxmox VE makes it easy.

Proxmox VE editions should be made available to other Linux distributions because they are only attached to Debian. There are people unfamiliar with Debian or have no environment with Debian. It would be very nice if Proxmox VE could eventually port to other Linux distributions.

I have been using Proxmox VE for ten years.

Proxmox VE is a very stable solution.

I rate the solution’s stability ten out of ten.

Proxmox VE is a very scalable solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability ten out of ten.

The solution’s pricing is very fair. The solution's pricing is cheaper than other solutions like VMware, Hyper-V, or Oracle.

Since Proxmox VE has its own firewall, I can use it eventually to manage access to my different virtual machines and containers. The solution provides very good security.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

The product helps me to use a group of servers and improves the speed.

The solution's most valuable feature is backups.

Proxmox VE needs to make a deal with Veeam. I was also unable to make version upgrades. I have also encountered backup problems.

I have been using the product for seven months.

I rate Proxmox VE's stability a seven out of ten.

I rate the tool's scalability a five out of ten.

The solution's technical support is not good. I find support through the internet.

Neutral

The tools' deployment is easy and I rate it a seven out of ten. It took two hours to complete. Install Proxmox VE on the server, then proceed to install the hard disk. After that, configure it for the work system and install the desired system. Finally, install all the necessary programs on the server. You need one resource to handle the deployment.

The tool's deployment can be done in-house.

The product is open-source and I rate its pricing an eight out of ten. You need to pay for support and it is costly.

I rate Proxmox VE an eight out of ten.

Private Cloud

We are cloud providers. We install the product to serve our customers.

KVM hypervisor is a valuable part of the solution.

We are having some problems with the product. It is suitable for small companies with 20 to 100 servers. My organization has more than 2500 servers in the hypervisor platform. We have problems when we try to migrate some servers to Proxmox. We are facing issues with disk utilization and disk performance. We are considering migrating all the servers back to VMware. The product must improve the disk performance and disc issues in general. The servers in Proxmox freeze sometimes. The file systems become read-only file systems after we restart the server. These are the main problems we are having nowadays.

I have been using the solution for a year.

I rate the tool’s stability a five out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a three out of ten. We set up 50 servers in our environment, which worked well. Then, when the virtual server numbers increased to 100, it worked fine. Later, when it was around 200 to 300, the performance got worse. It is getting worse with time. The more we scale, the more we have problems. Currently, we have 300 to 350 virtual servers. Our customers are small businesses.

We have trouble getting help from the support team.

Negative

I rate the ease of setup a four or five out of ten. The initial setup is not exactly difficult, but it is not easy either.

If the deployment is not very detailed, it takes us one day.

I rate the pricing a three out of ten. The product is free. There is no licensing fee. However, we do have to pay to get support. The support costs are reasonable.

I am using the latest version of the solution. I would recommend the solution for small businesses. I would not recommend it for medium and large enterprises. Overall, I rate the product a four out of ten.

On-premises

Proxmox creates an environment for writing script and virtualizing. I'm the senior finance administrator and I work in a research department in the health arena. 

The product is cost-effective to virtualize because of the ability to always create VMs. It allows us to create an individual virtual machine along with the GPU for machine learning. We can create multiple NPI notes, and whenever they need it, we can just power some down and bring them out. The solution is open source which is great for us and it's very reliable. Proxmox has given us the ability to do what a commercial organization can do but it's free. You don't have to buy any hardware. If you do take a subscription, they provide support. It's a good model.

The process for deployment is complicated and can be quite difficult for some; there's a steep learning curve if you've never dealt with the product before. 

We've used this solution for a couple of years. 

Stability is good, the solution functions well. 

Scalability is good, we have around 100 users. 

The initial setup is easy for me, because I'm very familiar with this product. Deployment takes an hour or two. 

The subscription version is not expensive but we don't always have the money to pay it. In that respect, both Netgear and Proxmox have been very important to us. 

This solution is accessible to anyone. It does take time to learn and experiment with it. I rate this product nine out of 10. 

We are using Proxmox VE for our internal services, we have a few virtual machines that run our mail servers, call center solutions, TDX, and other applications. Proxmox VE is a virtualized platform.

The most valuable feature of Proxmox VE is the speed. Additionally, I can modify the solution if needed because it is open-source and the integration of any kind of API and monitoring is hassle-free.

Proxmox VE can improve the management of virtual discs. For example, if my virtual disc is 200 GB and I want to decrease it is not easy. I have to do a lot of things to decrease the size of existing virtual machines. If the Proxmox VE team can make it easy for customers to instantly increase or decrease the virtual machine hard disc, it will be very helpful for me. However, the containers I can do it easily.

I have been using Proxmox VE for approximately seven years.

I rate the stability ofProxmox VE an eight out of ten.

The scalability of Proxmox VE could improve. The vertical scaling needs improvement. If the vertical scaling was better I could input the resources on the fly without shutting down the system. This would make it a lot easier.

We have approximately six technical support staff using this solution in my company. We plan to increase our usage of this solution.

I rate the scalability of Proxmox VE a six out of ten.

I have not had any issues that I would need to contact support about. 

I used Oracle Virtual Box and VMware prior to Proxmox VE. We choose Proxmox VE because of the cost savings, it is free.

Proxmox VE's initial setup of easy. I started the implementation process by selecting a location, installing the hardware and Proxmox VE, and then I made the cluster without the Proxmox VE. The last step was to implement my virtual machine. The full process did not take more than two hours.

I rate the initial setup of Proxmox VE a nine out of ten.

I did the implementation of this solution myself.

This is a free open-source solution.

My advice to others would be to choose simple solutions for only virtual machines with no extra integration of other features. This is an open-source solution and if someone wants to do something on the backend many things could go wrong. It is best to start with something simple, such as virtual machines with containers only. After they have had some experience then they can expand their knowledge with other solutions.

I rate Proxmox VE an eight out of ten.

On-premises

It's an open-source solution for virtualizing. It’s a server virtualization software. Everything that's work or life is managed by Proxmox.

It's a tool that opens doors so that we don't need to pay any fees. This is a good thing. It's helping us to use its resources with the server we have. If there's none, especially it's increasing productivity, it's a handy tool to help manage things.

The virtualization is good.

It’s open-source and free to use.

The product helps us utilize resources better.

Proxmox is a good solution for on-premise managing service and with machines.

The solution is easy to set up.

We’d like them to ensure there is an easy migration towards the cloud, which is where we’re moving. Right now, we are on-premises. We’d like to have a nice, simple interface to synchronize through the cloud.

It might be interesting to have the ability to integrate with other cloud solutions.

We’ve used the solution for the last five years now. It’s been a while.

I haven’t had any issues with stability just yet. We haven’t had any downtime from anything Proxmox has caused. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn’t crash or freeze.

It’s quite a scalable solution. We are happy with how much it can expand. It’s easy to add a new node.

We currently have three people using the product. They administer the solution.

We do not plan to increase usage right now. We already use it 100% in the places we can. We can’t use it any more than we do.

I’ve never used customer service in the past. I can’t speak to how helpful or responsive they are.

We did previously work with Citrix. We moved to this solution for a better user interface and stability. Citrix also changed the way it handled licensing. We preferred Proxmox’s licensing approach.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. It isn't that complex. I’d rate it at a one or a two in terms of complexity, on a scale from one to five.

The deployment depends a bit on how many nodes or servers you have. You want to get into the cluster. This depends on the month's amount of time, however, we have half a day for a server. For me, it takes a little bit of time. You need a half-day per node, per server. Maybe even less.

While maintenance is always necessary, I would say we would invest more or less a day a month just to maintain it and that would entail checking logs and so on. It doesn’t require heavy maintenance.

We handled the initial setup completely in-house. We didn’t need any outside assistance from any integrators or consultants.

ROI is hard to calculate. It’s a free solution and, as we do everything in-house, we have to measure the time we need to actually dominate the solution, however, it's really very little time.

This solution is open-source. We use only open-source solutions without any services. We handled everything in-house. There are no licensing costs and no extra fees.

I’m a customer and an end-user.

We’re about to migrate over to the 7.2 version from our current version. We have two clusters with servers we are managing with Proxmox.

I’d advise potential new users to just check it out and try it. The best thing to do is to set up a small installation or maybe mount it on a virtual box and play with it to see what t can do. It’s quite easy to start with.

I’d rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Proxmox VE is used for many sectors, such as medical, IT, and electronics. It is an open-source server management platform.

The most valuable features of Proxmox VE are the ease of containerization. Overall the solution is generic, feature-rich, and has compatibility.

The documentation in Proxmox VE could improve.

I'm new to this type of solution, there are all these features and options to select in various scenarios, but there's not much documentation out there to explain which option you should be choosing for what, and why. I know there are a lot of YouTube articles, Reddit documentation, and other information where people say if you want to do task A, here's is how, and people follow it blindly. However, nobody understands what they're doing, and why.  I'll tackle any task and develop a solution but I need to understand what I'm doing. I need to understand why I'm selecting certain options, what makes that appropriate, what would make the other option inappropriate, the pros and cons, the whole run-through. I find the documentation lacking.

What I have noticed while I'm running a firewall, FireHOL, which works with DNS, and a media server all runs on my Gen 8 MicroServer. It's an I3350 with 10 gigs of RAM, and I do find that the RAM usage is pretty high. I know I do not have all the RAM allocated to the containers, but I find that the overheads there seem to be pretty high. The high RAM usage comes with input-output latency. I don't seem to have the same problem on the dual Xeon, but again that has infinitesimally more computational power, one would expect that to run quicker.

When it comes to the firewall and other aspects, I'm only looking for a simple solution, low power consumption, good performance at home, to keep my home network on. If the documentation went into a bit more detail on what the overhead requirements of Proxmox VX are and why, and how to optimize, especially when you start bringing in Oracle ZFS and VFS power systems. The RAM usage increases a lot. There's practically nothing about that in the documentation. You have to hunt down the details in VFS, and its functionality elsewhere to figure it out.

On the dual Xeon, for distributed computing, it is running fine. The system is running 24/7 without any problems.

At the moment, one of the limitations is hardware passthrough into containers. To do that, you have to start getting privileged containers. I know there's a lot of hype in the public domain as to the pros and cons of that, and some parts are supported and some are not. It would be interesting to see if technology could develop to the point where we could pass through hardware into containerized applications.

I have been using Proxmox VE for approximately one year.

Proxmox VE is stable and reliable.

Server stability's been phenomenal and I'm running it on several old HP MicroServers. They're Gen 7, using the AMD Turion chips. I've been running it on the Gen 8, I3, 350, and dual CPU E3 in Xeon. there are some performance differences based on what the hardware's capable of, but no matter what platform I run it on there has not ever been any stability problems whatsoever.

The scalability is good. If you're working with generic processor models, it's easy to shift them across different platforms once you place the CPUs.

I have not needed to use the support from Proxmox VE. I have found all the answers I have needed online from user groups and Wiki support pages.

I rate the documentation and community support from Proxmox VE a three out of five.

I have used previously VMware and VirtualBox. Both are installs that have been on Microsoft Windows, and I found them both to be very limiting, very difficult to set up and manage. Proxmox VE, I found to be the easiest to use, quickest in terms of response, and has the best functionality.

The initial setup is very easy. Once you get the hang of it, setting up the VMs, containers, and deploying them is incredibly quick.

The setup for most of the configurations is similar, once you understand the concepts and the principles, it comes down to basics. You know your hardware and what you're setting up, and what it's capable of doing. You can't set up older generation hardware and then expect to have PCI Express Passthrough or GPU Passthrough, because the hardware doesn't support it.

You can't expect the solution to do what the base hardware is not capable of doing. Work within the constraints of the hardware, understand your hardware, and the OS.

You can download the solution and it is an open-source installation, it is exactly the same as their commercial solution.

The maintenance of the solution depends on how you've set it up. If you've only set it up as a functional hypervisor, you have your VMs running, and that's the last thing you did, then you're going to have to come back every two weeks or every month to check on your OS updates, upgrades, and security patches, et cetera. However, you can automate a lot of that with Cron jobs. It's about learning the system which is based on Debian. If you understand Linux and Debian, you will understand how powerful the system is and what you can actually do with it. When you start running things, such as Monits or syslogs, you can automate any error messaging or any problems and it can be sent to your system administrator in an email.

Whether it's a case of regular backups that are happening, if everything is working well, then great, but if one fails, an I/O error or other errors pop up and you get notified of it quickly, then you can fix it easily. If you're only coming in every four weeks to have a look at it and see what's going on, things could have gone horribly wrong.

I would suggest to anybody who's running a hypervisor, is schedule regular backups. Back up your VMs regularly. Schedule it. Automate it, and make sure it happens on a separate machine, onto a separate machine, onto a separate host- because you don't want to lose your VM with all its backups.

If you've taken the time to set it up well with all your Cron jobs and automation, there will be almost zero maintenance.

I rate the implementation of Proxmox VE a five out of five.

To use Proxmox VE there is not a license required. However, you can purchase a support license, which you access, but it doesn't change the functionality of the solution.

Their licensing is very similar to other solutions, such as Canonical and Ubuntu. The full OS is available to you. If you want the support, you will need to pay a license fee.

My advice to others wanting to implement this solution is if you're looking to virtualize, ask yourself why. In terms of bringing your costs and energy consumption down, never mind the whole global eco-footprint hype that everybody wants to get onto. The reality is, for any business, keeping a business afloat is about dollars and cents, and if you can accomplish your IT tasks at a lower cost and expense, have better utilization of hardware, you've probably already hacked a path to what way to move forward.

Instead of spending hundreds of thousands on multiple servers, to then have a less than 5% utilization on each machine, while they using up 500, 600 watts of power, is not efficient. With virtualization, you're running multiple VMs on one physical piece of hardware. You get much better utilization out of it, you're getting much more for the money you are paying, and without any significant drop in performance.

When one considers the internal networking on the VM, where you have different VMs and your containers are running on internal networks. You're not limited to gigabits or 10-gigabits throughputs. It runs on the PCI Express speeds on the board, it is a lot quicker.

I rate Proxmox VE an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for Proxmox VE is for virtualization and a little bit of SaaS storage, basically for virtual machines.

Proxmox VE is simple to use and it is feature rich. The fact is that it performs,

The only issue I have with Proxmox VE is updating it. You have to manually update it or you have to have a way to update it automatically.

The main area for improvement is with the automatic updates, if it's even possible, even if you have to pay for the cloud services. Updates are very important.

If they could fine tune the updating process that would be good.

I have been using Proxmox VE for two years.

Proxmox VE is stable. We have a few issues where all of a sudden you can't update it, because maybe you have taken too long to update the repository. This is a concern for us. Like I mentioned before, the updating feature is very important to us because there could be some security issues.

There are a lot of actions that you need to do with commands, which have not been automated yet. I believe that with time it will be automated.

In terms of scalability, we didn't have any need for scaling because just the fact that you can put them in a cluster and manage one unit is a very good feature. I don't have to manage it individually, I can just put them together in a cluster and manage them for one single piece. I'm about to test the backup feature and also maybe upgrade it to the next version, which is 7.0. I'm expecting that there will be a lot of improvement.

Right now we have about six users on a project that I'm deploying. I'm still managing the project, but due to COVID it has gone on for two years, but we're just about to hand it over. Because of the COVID issue, nobody wants to come to one place to sit down and do anything. All of last year was just wasted, but this year we're able to do a number of things with them. The manual process of updating one by one is relatively stable. In the account, you have to centralize the management. You have to log in one by one and you can have a different password for for each one, it's not unified. They have not unified the authorization process.

One thing I have noticed is that because I put a password on one it is expecting me to manually put a password on the other node. I would expect that for better management you can have the same propagating password. Maybe there's a better way to do it, but that's what I have been seeing and I found that I have to be doing this for each one on each node. That is an issue, but so far it's been very good. It's been very stable. I never had any issues with it. It's cool stuff.

I  really like the software storage. I used it on one of the cloud servers that we set up and it's working very well.

We do plan to increase the usage in the future.

Proxmox VE is very simple to use.

The deployment took a long time, but it was not because of Proxmox. It was some other issues for other projects. Installing the Proxmox software is very easy. It just takes a day or two.

We did it in-house.

Our license is on a yearly basis.

There are no other costs, just the license fee and the license is flexible. You could decide to go subscription only or you could decide to pay for support.

My advice to anyone considering Proxmox VE is that they should study it to understand it, because it is feature reach, so you have to read the manuals. They have to read the manual and unfortunately the manual training level is on the high side, so for people who are experimenting or who are just coming into the free version, it might be a little bit hard for them. Proxmox should try and market more on the training side so users can speed it up and have a good adoption. I hear that people understand the product very well, because right now I don't think it has a rival. It's trying to beat the Oracle VM or the other VMs in the market.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Proxmox VE a seven.

On-premises