Proxmox vs. VMware ESXi: A Head-to-Head Comparison
The question businesses are asking themselves:
Should they migrate their virtualized environment to another hypervisor or should they stick with VMware?
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has left many businesses feeling left behind as they changed the structure of the company. The acquisition of VMware has had significant implications for the cloud and virtualization industry, affecting pricing, licensing, and product offerings. An overwhelming 95% of businesses that used VMware see this new leadership as disruptive to their IT strategy and many anticipating price hikes. In the wake of this, many businesses are looking for alternatives to VMware. In this article I wanted to take a closer look at a open-source competitor, Proxmox VE.
Both Proxmox and VMware ESXi are type-1 hypervisors, meaning they run directly on the bare metal of your server hardware. They allow you to virtualize your operating systems, essentially creating multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical machine. However, they cater to different user groups:
Proxmox:
Focus: Open-source platform with a strong community focus. Ideal for small and medium businesses (SMBs), home labs, and hobbyists. Recently, becoming more popular among some enterprise customers moving away from VMware.
Use Cases: Consolidation of servers, running diverse operating systems and applications simultaneously, disaster recovery, and personal experimentation.
Benefits: Free and open-source, user-friendly web interface, supports both VMs and containers (LXC), extensive documentation and community support.
Support Model: Primarily community-driven support through forums and online resources. Paid support options are available, but limited.
Development: Actively developed with a focus on stability, business continuity and new features.
Capabilities: Supports KVM virtualization for VMs, LXC containers, built-in web interface for management and a mobile app for management on the go, integrates with various storage solutions (ZFS, Ceph, GlusterFS, etc.), offers backup and disaster recovery tools, along with high-availability clustering. In addition, there is no need for a dedicated manager node to administer the cluster.
VMware ESXi:
Focus: Enterprise-grade proprietary virtualization solution from VMware. Ideal for large data centers, mission-critical workloads, and environments requiring high performance and scalability.
Use Cases: Large-scale server consolidation, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), high availability deployments, managing complex IT infrastructure.
Benefits: Industry-standard platform, robust feature set, high performance and scalability, extensive enterprise support options.
Support Model: Paid support directly from VMware or through authorized partners.
Development: Actively developed with a focus on performance, security, business continuity, and integration with other VMware products.
Capabilities: Supports various virtualization technologies (vSphere), advanced features for resource management, high availability clustering, disaster recovery options, extensive APIs for automation.
Here's a like-for-like comparison to help you decide:
Proxmox VE
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Free and open-source - No license is required to get started and is fully featured
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Mainly SMBs, home labs, and hobbyists, however, has been recently gaining traction with enterprises
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Primarily community-driven, but does offer paid support. For pricing visit Proxmox VE's subscriptions page.
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The primary interface is a web-based management interface providing rich features allowing management tasks along with task history and system logs for each node. In addition, it includes backup tasks, live migration, software-defined storage, and HA triggered activities. It also allows you to manage your cluster without a dedicated manager node.
However, for those that like a more traditional command line, Proxmox VE also features a CLI for advanced users that are comfortable with Unix or Powershell which is great for scripting capabilities.
And if that weren't enough, there's also an Android mobile app or the mobile version of the web interface to offer the ability to login to your Proxmox server on the go.
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Based on Debian GNU/Linux, it uses a custom Linux kernel. This allows the deployment of Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVMs). In addition, Proxmox also features container-based virtualization and also Linux Containers (LXCs), see the Containers section for more details.
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Supporting container-based virtualization technology, a lightweight alternative to full machine virtualization, because it shares the host system's kernel. This makes them faster to deploy and manage than traditional VMs saving time and money in application development.
Proxmox VE also supports Linux Containers (LXCs) which is a set of 1 or more processes that are isolated from the rest of the operating system. All the files needed to run them are contained in an image making them portable and faster to use in a development timeline.
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ZFS, Ceph, GlusterFS, and others. For a full list of storage types offered, visit the Proxmox storage page for more information.
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There are multiple backup and recovery options available including scheduled backup jobs and also backup storage.
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Large and active community forum. For the free iterations, this is the primary source for support. Proxmox also has an extension documentation platform with lots of information as well.
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Stability, business continuity, and new features
VMware ESXi
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Paid, various licensing tiers available. VMware offers different tiers such as per CPU licensing, per VM licensing, or subscription based licensing.
Navigating the licensing structure can get a bit confusing. For more details, check VMware's licensing page.
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Large enterprises, data centers
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Paid support from VMware or partners
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Web-based (vSphere Client) or command-line via SSH. vSphere Client is web-based only and no mobile app. The web user interface is accessible via a mobile browser, but functionality is a bit limited.
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vSphere (supports multiple technologies). Deploy virtual machines such as Windows and Linux based systems. For more information relating to vSphere Integrated Containers (VICs) see their documentation page.
For managing multiple ESXi hosts, VMware requires the use of a central management node running vCenter where VM migration, clustering, vSAN, Kubernetes, distributed virtual switches, and more are installed.
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vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) can be deployed to standalone ESXi hosts. VIC is a containerized environment that uses a container runtime called the VIC Engine to provision containers as virtual machines (VMs) on ESXi hosts or vCenter Server instances. VIC offers the same security and functionality as VMs in these environments.
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VMFS, along with various options with vCenter Server.
Local storage
Internal hard disks or external storage systems connected to the host using SAS, SATA, or other protocols. ESXi supports many local storage devices, including SCSI, IDE, USB, flash, and NVMe.
Network-based storage
Storage connected via NAS or SAN, which can improve the scalability of a server's storage subsystem. To use network-based storage, you need to configure your network and the ESXi host's network settings.
Storage Area Network (SAN)
A high-speed network that combines storage from multiple ESXi hosts. SAN protocols include Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI. FC is similar to SCSI but uses the FC protocol, and can be expensive to implement. iSCSI is a high-performance protocol that uses Ethernet connections.
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Requires additional vSphere products or third-party tools. VMware ESXi offers a variety of backup and recovery options, including:
Virtual machine backup and restore
Use the import and export functions to back up a virtual machine to disk or restore from it. You can also create and restore a snapshot, which saves the difference between two timestamps.
Virtual disaster recovery
Create a virtual machine on a remote server and recover your system there. You'll need to back up your computer's system state, the entire system disk, and any other important data. You'll also need 64-bit virtual disaster recovery software, such as the Backup Manager or Recovery Console.
ESXi host configuration backup and restore
Use the ESXi command line to back up the ESXi host configuration. This is the most affordable method and doesn't require additional software. You can also use vSphere CLI or PowerCLI to export the configuration. To restore the configuration data, the build number of the host must match the build number of the host on the backup file.
File-based backup
This allows for granular restores, where you can restore individual files or folders instead of the entire VM. This can be useful if a specific file or folder has been deleted or corrupted.
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Smaller, vendor-centric community.
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Performance, security, enterprise integration, business continuity.
Choosing Between Them:
Go for Proxmox if: You prioritize affordability, enjoy community support, and have a moderate virtualization need. If you also have experience with virtualization and Debian Linux, this can be a great choice for you.
Choose VMware ESXi if: You require high performance, scalability, extensive support options, and manage complex enterprise environments.
Remember, Proxmox offers a great entry point for virtualization, while ESXi caters to large-scale, mission-critical deployments. Both have good use cases, but it will ultimately depend on your specific use case to determine the appropriate fit for your business. It’s always a good idea to test out both options in a non-production environment before making a decision.
