Key findings
- Proxmox is a versatile and cost-effective solution for production environments.
- Proxmox offers industry-standard features such as Ceph and Open vSwitch.
- Proxmox offers all its features for free, making it ideal for both businesses and home labs.
Although Proxmox is often associated with home lab setups, you can do a lot more with it besides hosting your favorite VMs. If you're familiar with Hyper-V or VMware's suite of software, Proxmox will take a little time to get to grips with, but it's a cost-effective solution that's great for production environments. If you run a home business and aren't averse to tinkering around with Linux or KVM, there are actually several reasons you might want to incorporate Proxmox into your workflow.
3 A Linux-based kernel with a simple user interface
It has the best of both worlds
Say what you will about Linux, but there's no denying that it's the best operating system for DevOps and sysadmin tasks. Since Proxmox has its roots in Debian, if you're familiar with Linux, you won't have too many problems troubleshooting it or running shell commands.
As for the UI, it can be a bit jarring for former ESXi users, and it may take a few days to get used to the Proxmox UI. However, I would even go as far as to say that Proxmox offers a relatively straightforward UI compared to other virtualization-focused platforms – and even NAS operating systems. Plus, there is more than enough documentation to get you started with creating, deploying, and monitoring all your containers and virtual machines on Proxmox.
2 Industry-specific features
Competes with those of the competition
One of the biggest shortcomings of open source tools is the lack of support for key enterprise-level services. However, Proxmox is a great exception as it includes all the tools you would normally find in industrial applications. First of all, Proxmox is compatible with ZFS, GlusterFS and even BTRFS file systems. However, if you want to go to the next level, nothing beats the Ceph distributed file system. By allowing you to create a storage cluster from a set of disks, Ceph offers a good alternative to VMware's vSphere service.
Speaking of clustering, Proxmox also allows you to link different nodes in a unified interface. You can even set up high-availability clusters to ensure your nodes stay up and running at all times. For networking, check out the Open vSwitch implementation, which allows you to configure everything from VLANs and bridges to the NAT service and RST protocol. With Veeam's recent announcement to move away from VMware and add support for Proxmox, the latter now has the edge when it comes to backups. And best of all…
1 Everything is free to use
Say goodbye to buying licenses for commercial projects
Compared to an average hypervisor or virtualization platform, you can use Proxmox for free and without any strings attached. Thanks to the GPLv3 license, you can use Proxmox in commercial projects without having to pay high subscription fees to some service providers. Of course, Proxmox includes a number of commercial licenses, but these are only available for corporate repositories and fast response times.
So, you can enjoy all the features highlighted in the previous section without paying a penny. The free version of Proxmox works incredibly well for most projects and you don't have to miss out on any important features if you don't opt for the paid version.
Proxmox is great for businesses as well as home labs
Interrupt remapping, a necessary IOMMU setting, is difficult to enable on X99 boards
If you're still hesitant about using Proxmox in your business environment, you might want to give it a try first. It's pretty easy to set up and we have a complete guide that covers everything you need to know to build your Proxmox muscles. After that, you can experiment with some useful projects before switching to Proxmox for your development environment.