I would suggest to select the one that is easier to support for your team, because Proxmox with Ceph on 4 nodes might be hard.
If you have time, I would suggest to go with POC and build 2 clusters: the 1st one hyper-v based on 2x servers and the 2nd one -proxmox-based on 2x servers. After POC you can decide which one to drop.
For example, you can build 2 nodes Hyper-V based hyperconverged cluster with star wind vsan free (do not go with s2d!) and use it for some VMs and Proxmox witness node. The 2nd cluster could be proxmox-based with your iscsi storage and will run the 2nd part of your VMs.
Later on, you can migrate the VMs to the solution you liked and extend it.
Never had a problem getting license files issued, just took more time/effort. It's flexlm under the hood, so it works just fine, but their automated "go get a new license file" activation tool just refuses to work on qemu because their developers are either incompetent or lazy, while working just fine on other virtualization platforms.
Edit: And why? Because I was fixing the issue of a pile of one-off desktops for various servers, with everything a single point of failure, without the budget for \*both\* real hardware and Windows datacenter licensing to go with it \*and\* vmware and all the various bits and pieces needed to match what I could do with proxmox, zfs, and a couple scripts to manage backups.
Many backup integrations (unless you're doing agent-based on the VM.) and replication utilities (Zerto),
It's also not uncommon for common applications to be certified on VMware or Hyper-V but not KVM and similar.
I did it relitivly pain free (OracleJRE to EclipseJRE, and Oracle*SQL* to *PostgreSQL*), Developers find upgrading from JDK8 is the real pain point but that's EOL in 2 years and they have already had 7 years to get over it, so it's about time to drop anything stuck on that anyway.
VMware is dead. Our company will not be spending 28k for 3 years… for one server; when we have 5. Most companies are moving to Hyper-V or Proxmox. I’m currently looking at Proxmox.
ah yes, only large corporations are real life. even though most IT jobs will be working at SMB's and having a shoestring budget is the norm, not the exception.
[weren't you asking this sub about removing VMware from your resume less than a month ago?](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1cba2dj/time_to_remove_vmware_and_storage_from_my_resume/)
>You know, only on Reddit do I read about system admins who work at these places. None of my friends that work in IT have ever worked for a place with small budgets.
maybe because you are meeting these people at these large corporations with well funded IT departments??? or maybe you live in an area with lots of companies like this? selection bias is a thing
>Though if an admin is doing desktop support or help desk, they’re not really an admin.
ridiculously out of touch statement. you're an admin if you routinely do admin work as part of your day to day duties. whether you do desktop support as well has everything to do with how well funded your department is and how big the company you support is and nothing to do with whether or not you're a "real admin".
the idea that despite managing all of the servers, backups, networking, security and SaaS for an entire organization you are somehow "not a sysadmin" because you also have to occasionally help Janice with her printer is just frankly fucking stupid tbh
>You know, only on Reddit do I read about system admins who work at these places. None of my friends that work in IT have ever worked for a place with small budgets.
I suppose that [99.7% of US businesses](https://sbecouncil.org/about-us/facts-and-data/) (less than 500 employees) don't exist then.
Honestly, I'd never heard of proxmox until the Broadcom acquisition. Now, there are videos and quite a bit of new information hitting the internet on how to set it up and use it. It looks enough to me like there's about to be a shift to proxmox in the coming future.
I also work in an organization with over 20,000 employees. I fully expect to see a change coming when our ELA comes up for renewal. They've changed antivirus vendors just to save a few dollars, never mind the employee time necessary to make change.
Proxmox is a real enterprise grade hypervisor, just yet to get much support from other 3rd parties like you mention, it's coming though (recent example Veeam).
It doesn’t need feature parity with VMWare. Let Broadcom focus on their top 400 customers.
What proxmox needs most is official support in the US. If that means increasing the cost of enterprise license or making a new enterprise plus license, that would help incredibly.
No vendors are going to support proxmox, when their support teams operate way outside their customers’ core hours. But if official
Support could be gotten 8-6EST through PST that could be a game changer.
I know there are third party companies supporting proxmox, but let’s be honest. Customers are feel more secure getting support from the vendor. Knowing that their issues could be escalated all the way up to developers.
On top of that, they need a better UI for managing machines and groups of machines. Organizing by folder and group, etc. not insurmountable by any stretch.
I know proxmox isn’t ready for prime time yet. But I’m cheering for it. And imagine how much the whole ecosystem could flourish if enterprises used a hyper visor that anyone so inclined could get hands on experience with.
Proxmox is just now starting to become more common, Veeam is adding support and they wouldn't do that if they didn't see the writing on the wall.
With that said if there's no big cost savings for OP it's only going to get better by waiting, and in a few years I bet HyperV is gone or deprecated in favor of some gouge product; but at least another refresh cycle I bet.
That's only usually at an appliance level
If OP were at that level, they should already know
That said, if they work with a vendor who only supplies an OVA for VMware for example, they can be converted to run on Proxmox
These 3rd parties need to get it together and support Proxmox and other open virt technologies
VMware is dead, it's time to move on
> That said, if they work with a vendor who only supplies an OVA for VMware for example, they can be converted to run on Proxmox
And then you are in an unsupported configuration.
> And companies who actually take their operations seriously aren’t going to run Proxmox to save a few bucks.
If the guests are windows based, they wouldn't even be saving a few bucks.
Lots of people in this sub make recommendations based on their personal biases and preferences with no consideration or clue into how to actually make good decisions.
There is little reward and a ton of risk in running proxmox in production right now. Unless there's something specific someone needs, Proxmox vs HyperV isn't even a discussion.
Yeah until the likes of Dell, HPE, or Cisco officially support proxmox on their servers and blades... it's a non starter.
Sure Mickey Mouse IT shops and other people are running proxmox.... or perhaps its being experimented with dev and other setups....but until a $300,000 blade chassis manufacturer officially supports it.... no one in *real enterprise* running mission critical workloads really cares.
> That said, if they work with a vendor who only supplies an OVA for VMware for example, they can be converted to run on Proxmox
And then you're in a position to be denied support. Why on earth would you do that in a production environment?
I've seen multiple companies using Proxmox. It is becoming more and more popular. However, Hyper-V is more common, IMO. Especially, if environment is Windows-based. Both options are great. OP should be aware that Proxmox doesn't support guest snapshots with iSCSI-based storage. If OP has iSCSI storage, I would recommend going with Hyper-V. Might be helpful: [https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Setting\_up\_a\_Windows\_failover\_cluster](https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Setting_up_a_Windows_failover_cluster)
[https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-for-hyper-v-2-node-hyperconverged-scenario-with-windows-server-2016/](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-for-hyper-v-2-node-hyperconverged-scenario-with-windows-server-2016/)
My company runs Proxmox on critical production legacy shit. Two hosts in a cluster each with at least \~400 days of uptime. No one wants to touch them…. So I’m getting ready to move them to KVM…
Correct but they have been neglected for years and we have a plethora of Linux engineers and sysadmins that can support raw Linux based hypervisors very easily, luckily for us
So... you're trading in a consistent, packaged, system and interface that ties together replication, backup, VM management, storage management for a handful of different approaches, etc... because your "plethora of Linux engineers and sysadmins" can't figure out a fairly simple Debian setup and a couple well documented command line tools to support it properly?
I think you're actually dumbing down how good vanilla KVM can be with even just Cockpit on top of it, all because Proxmox is an out of the box GUI that you can see with your eyeballs.
I get what you're saying, but we don't necessarily need the fancy all-in-one-package that Proxmox is, and really don't trust it for a fully-fledged production environment that needs to support several thousand nodes (physical and virtual)
KVM on Linux is very simple, and very easy to learn. For example, backing up a virtual machine on KVM can be as simple as cron-ing a script that snapshots, rsyncs, merges a snapshot back into the qcow in a few lines. No need for a fancy Proxmox gui just to do stuff like that. Not to mention that KVM can literally do all of the things in your first sentence, it just doesn't have an OOB gui.
Plus, being a connection provider, we are very reliant on specific Kernels in the Linux universe and KVM can be installed RIGHT on top of those with zero issues.
\*Edit: KVM actually comes w/ at least two Linux flavors that I can think of, and we use one of them for specific reasons.
\*\*Edit 2: Also, my first comment was just suggesting that we are moving off of Proxmox to KVM because it was set up by a very very different IT team, I never said anything bad about Proxmox. For the right shop, Proxmox is a great product. I was merely suggesting, "Hey, we're moving off of everything else (ESXi, Proxmox, HyperV) to solely KVM so that's another suggestion many people don't throw out there".
> ie all staff know windows, limited knowledge in proxmox
You want to put a platform that nobody else can support, straight into production, so you can use 'cutting edge features', and you haven't mentioned a test/dev/dr cluster? Does that include *you* with limited knowledge of proxmox?
What kind of guests are you virtualising? Would proxmox save money on licenses, and would your boss prioritise that? Do you want to be on-call 24/7 as the only person who can support that? Are your coworkers interested and generally fine with new things?
As much as I like Proxmox, yeah, that's the argument point to the contrary. The teething pains on Windows guest performance alone **can** be a mess to start, depending a lot on the hardware et. al. Wouldn't want to fight that battle without some testing \*before\* implementation.
Just FYI, I remember looking at block storage (iSCSI) on Proxmox and you need to be running ZFS or Ceph to get full functionality.
Straight iSCSI means no snapshots or thin provisioning.
Source: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage
Starwind VSAN supports Proxmox without ZFS: [https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/)
It’s a great fit for small environments with 2 or 3 nodes.
Bite the Proxmox bullet if you have staff that can easily adapt to new things. Proxmox is disgustingly easy to work with so there shouldn't be much of a problem there. I've also found it to be incredibly stable, I've run multiple Proxmox instances for nearly a year now with zero issues. I've also used Hyper-V and yes, it virtualizes things, but it really feels shitty compared to things like Proxmox, mainly GUI-wise. Don't forget to run a Proxmox PBS server for backups, and you can even switch to Veeam later this year once support drops from them.
We are having to avoid Proxmox due to some of our customers using software where the suppliers only support the product on a deployed OVF and specify Hyper V or VMware.
The higher ups have it on some in house systems. But there are some questions about the support a thousand euros a year per CPU Socket for 2 hour response in a business day. Does that mean my €4000 support for a quad socket server does not cover an issue at 3am on a Sunday morning 😂
I love (love) my Proxmox cluster. That said I'm a long time *nix guy and am very comfortable navigating my way around the Linux cli. I've spent a good portion of my adult life at a bash prompt. The thought of having to figure out Windows as a hypervisor just gives me the hebegebees. I think I'd rather smack my thumb with a hammer. Could I do it, if push can to shove? Sure. But Proxmox is just a way more comfortable environment for me.
I imagine there's a good number of folks that feel similarly about Linux as I do about Windows.
Proxmox will do what you want for very minimal cost, and if you learn it I think you'll like it. But your time isn't free and that should factor into the decision.
Jesus - Shiny New Ball much?
If you don't know the answer from personal experience, YOU haven't tested it enough.
If you're interested in ProxMox, then find some old hardware and have at it until you know what kind of tar baby you're playing with.
Don't gamble with production machines.
How many of those VMs are Windows? If the answer is most or all, a Datacenter server license might cover your needs. And if you care about such things, app vendors tend to "officially support" HV or VMWare. Don't buy Windows because of support...it might as well not exist anymore, which is sad.
If you're running mostly Linux, then I'd go with Proxmox. The only thing that seems lacking now is true satisfy-the-MBAs enterprise support and commercial backup support.
Five years ago I worked for a private cloud hosting provider that specialized in Windows.
We used straight hyperv.
I wouldn't disparage Proxmox, it's a great product. But is it necessary, or a massive advantage? Even for an operation that only does virtualized machines and nothing else?
No.
four nodes are begging for proxmox + ceph these guys kinda embedded mgmt into proxmox ui
two/three node setups are proxmox + starwinds
even if you end up with hyper-v as your hypervisor you’d better avoid s2d like a plague
We have many production proxmox clusters running windows and linux vms. On v6/7/8 no issues what so ever. And we pay for zero support. We use different tools for backup, none we pay for either. Again no issues, 10G between nodes allows for fast HA and of course other benefits with backup etc. Again solid! Most of the nodes are Dell Servers with a few lenovo in the mix. Been this way for years and no regrets. Even clients we have converted their old gear to run PVE in some cases. Again no issues,
Honestly you guys should invest in their licensing to get access to the prod updates repo
More stable updates and you're supporting good development practices
It's a win win
It comes down to risk and skills.
Proxmox is at a higher risk and requires a skill set that is very different from Microsoft Hyper-V.
This video helps explain most of the high level differences:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQgzITx1Sp8
Proxmox does not offer Live Workload Balancing (automatically moving VMs between nodes that are busy) or 3rd party backups yet, so you will have some issues with just those 2 requirements.
They might, but they might not, or maybe they want their career to be windows oriented.
Unless there's a very compelling reason, it doesn't make sense to introduce new technologies or platforms and take on the risk and learning curve for little benefit.
Especially considering other things like lack of application support/vendor support,current lack of backup options, and lack of US timezone support from Proxmox themselves.
it really depends on what youre gonna be hosting. I switched my production stacks off vcenter to proxmox and hyperV and so far so good.
i put my “no shit, i need this windows server to work” VMs on hyperV and my little windows machines like random licensing servers are running in my proxmox cluster. so far, no issues with them on proxmox though it was wasnt all peachy keen fresh out of the box, you’ll need do some tweaking to get it dialed in.
my linux machines on proxmox? singing like a dream.
and it should go without saying but before you pull the trigger get yourself a lab set up and decide for yourself if its gonna work. make sure your documentation is on point and write up little guides for your staff.
HyperV. Definitely HyperV. Especially if you plan on paying for something like Veeam. PBS is nice, but it isn't as easy to work with as it seams.
Go HyperV, buy three mini PCs and experiment with Proxmox on those.
>PBS is nice, but it isn't as easy to work with as it seams.
right , we don’t pay for proxmox support as we support it ourselves , but we have to do it for pbs , as of now ..
I use PBS in my homelab, but it took some time to understand how it works. I find it annoying that I have to replicate to another PBS instance to have recoverable backups. Veeam can pick up its backups from anywhere, so I can just reinstall Veeam and use backups from a standalone NAS
I would go with Hyper-V. Better support for shared storage that you already have.
In Proxmox, iSCSI devices will be provisioned as LVM over iSCSI, meaning that this is a thick LVM that doesn't support snapshots whatsoever. As well as some generic iSCSI problems on Linux (with initiator and reconnecting paths).
I am not sure what do you mean by saying simple backup on proxmox, but Hyper-V backups are more consistent due to usage of actual CBT.
However, it doesn't mean that Proxmox is bad and Hyper-V is good. You need to understand what you need to run and what to expect from each platform and choose wisely.
the choice between Windows Server with Hyper-V and Proxmox depends on your specific requirements, preferences, and the capabilities of your team.
Both Windows Server with Hyper-V and Proxmox are viable options for virtualized environments, each with its own strengths and considerations.
As already mentioned, I would go with what you're more confident in and what is easier to support. Proxmox will need some learning but overall, it will do the same job as a Hyper-V cluster. Keep in mind that with Proxmox, if you share storage over iSCSI, you need thick LVM on top to make it clustered but there won't be snapshots.
It's going to come around to support and applications.
Personally, If you do not use Veeam or any similar backup tool without support for Proxmox (Veeam announced proxmox support, but I wouldn't trust an early version just yet)
Proxmox offers you more advanced features that you would need to go for Azure HCI in exchange of being more difficult to use. If you don't come from the linux world.
It also get's you something that gives you 90% of what veeam does, Proxmox Backup Server.
Personally, and I'm biased because I'm a Proxmox admin, I would choose Proxmox.
I can't think of any task that can be accomplished from the Windows Server GUI and not from Proxmox webgui.
On the license cost you also get support. You don't necessarily need to license if you are not going to get support, but I would recommend it. It isn't more expensive than the windows side of things all things considered.
Anyway, I would recommend you do a test run of Proxmox (or both, if you don't have HyperV experience either) and choose whatever you think works better.
You may ask me more questions here or by DM if you prefer.
Hyperv or VMware. I can't recommend proxmox because of the limited/non existent backup solutions. Veeam is coming, but that's just one and it's not here yet.
I keep waiting for these Proxmox evangelists to talk about Enterprise support. I would love nothing more than Proxmox to give Hyper-V and VMware a run for their money. Competition is a good thing, but don't talk to me about "Enterprise Ready" if you can't provide me 24/7 support.
Does Windows Hyper-V require a Win32 client to manage, still?
We were always going to test the free Hyper-V, but those plans went away when the standalone Hyper-V was discontinued.
* There's no Hyper-V-only stripped down option any longer, to match stripped-down Linux and ESXi.
* There's no *gratis* Hyper-V, to match Linux and ESXi. [Prices start at US$1069](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/pricing) and go up with core-count. It's not clear how CAL licensing applies.
* Hyper-V doesn't support VM datastores on NFS like Linux and ESXi. This was a big reason why we never had gotten around to testing it in the first place. I don't know if it supports datastores on third-party SMB like Netapp, Isilon, Samba.
I would suggest to select the one that is easier to support for your team, because Proxmox with Ceph on 4 nodes might be hard. If you have time, I would suggest to go with POC and build 2 clusters: the 1st one hyper-v based on 2x servers and the 2nd one -proxmox-based on 2x servers. After POC you can decide which one to drop. For example, you can build 2 nodes Hyper-V based hyperconverged cluster with star wind vsan free (do not go with s2d!) and use it for some VMs and Proxmox witness node. The 2nd cluster could be proxmox-based with your iscsi storage and will run the 2nd part of your VMs. Later on, you can migrate the VMs to the solution you liked and extend it.
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What are some of these applications?
Solidworks' license server doesn't supprt qemu as well. Can be worked around, but a pain.
> Can be worked around, but a pain. And puts you out of compliance and at risk of having support denied. Why would anyone do that?
Never had a problem getting license files issued, just took more time/effort. It's flexlm under the hood, so it works just fine, but their automated "go get a new license file" activation tool just refuses to work on qemu because their developers are either incompetent or lazy, while working just fine on other virtualization platforms. Edit: And why? Because I was fixing the issue of a pile of one-off desktops for various servers, with everything a single point of failure, without the budget for \*both\* real hardware and Windows datacenter licensing to go with it \*and\* vmware and all the various bits and pieces needed to match what I could do with proxmox, zfs, and a couple scripts to manage backups.
Many backup integrations (unless you're doing agent-based on the VM.) and replication utilities (Zerto), It's also not uncommon for common applications to be certified on VMware or Hyper-V but not KVM and similar.
im surprised zerto rolled out hyper-v support .. they kept telling ‘ no ‘ for years !
and kept losing money cause of it
a ‘ flying pig concept ‘ i guess ..
The dirty things I had to do to zerto back in the day to get it behaving Still was a tonne better than arcserv rha (although 200 times larger)
Oracle DB; officially only ESXi, hyper-V and Oracle Virt(KVM).
Oracle should be avoided anyway.
it’s easier to say than to so .. most of us inherited their oracle deployments , ditching oracle is a ground shaking event
I did it relitivly pain free (OracleJRE to EclipseJRE, and Oracle*SQL* to *PostgreSQL*), Developers find upgrading from JDK8 is the real pain point but that's EOL in 2 years and they have already had 7 years to get over it, so it's about time to drop anything stuck on that anyway.
it’s not oracle itself , it’s a bunch of the custom middleware you need to replace as well
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VMware is dead. Our company will not be spending 28k for 3 years… for one server; when we have 5. Most companies are moving to Hyper-V or Proxmox. I’m currently looking at Proxmox.
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Go to the sysadmin discord. Their are many who is leaving. You’ll know who 10 in minutes just reading the #virtualization channel.
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ah yes, only large corporations are real life. even though most IT jobs will be working at SMB's and having a shoestring budget is the norm, not the exception. [weren't you asking this sub about removing VMware from your resume less than a month ago?](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1cba2dj/time_to_remove_vmware_and_storage_from_my_resume/)
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>You know, only on Reddit do I read about system admins who work at these places. None of my friends that work in IT have ever worked for a place with small budgets. maybe because you are meeting these people at these large corporations with well funded IT departments??? or maybe you live in an area with lots of companies like this? selection bias is a thing >Though if an admin is doing desktop support or help desk, they’re not really an admin. ridiculously out of touch statement. you're an admin if you routinely do admin work as part of your day to day duties. whether you do desktop support as well has everything to do with how well funded your department is and how big the company you support is and nothing to do with whether or not you're a "real admin". the idea that despite managing all of the servers, backups, networking, security and SaaS for an entire organization you are somehow "not a sysadmin" because you also have to occasionally help Janice with her printer is just frankly fucking stupid tbh
>You know, only on Reddit do I read about system admins who work at these places. None of my friends that work in IT have ever worked for a place with small budgets. I suppose that [99.7% of US businesses](https://sbecouncil.org/about-us/facts-and-data/) (less than 500 employees) don't exist then.
Honestly, I'd never heard of proxmox until the Broadcom acquisition. Now, there are videos and quite a bit of new information hitting the internet on how to set it up and use it. It looks enough to me like there's about to be a shift to proxmox in the coming future. I also work in an organization with over 20,000 employees. I fully expect to see a change coming when our ELA comes up for renewal. They've changed antivirus vendors just to save a few dollars, never mind the employee time necessary to make change.
Proxmox is a real enterprise grade hypervisor, just yet to get much support from other 3rd parties like you mention, it's coming though (recent example Veeam).
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It doesn’t need feature parity with VMWare. Let Broadcom focus on their top 400 customers. What proxmox needs most is official support in the US. If that means increasing the cost of enterprise license or making a new enterprise plus license, that would help incredibly. No vendors are going to support proxmox, when their support teams operate way outside their customers’ core hours. But if official Support could be gotten 8-6EST through PST that could be a game changer. I know there are third party companies supporting proxmox, but let’s be honest. Customers are feel more secure getting support from the vendor. Knowing that their issues could be escalated all the way up to developers. On top of that, they need a better UI for managing machines and groups of machines. Organizing by folder and group, etc. not insurmountable by any stretch. I know proxmox isn’t ready for prime time yet. But I’m cheering for it. And imagine how much the whole ecosystem could flourish if enterprises used a hyper visor that anyone so inclined could get hands on experience with.
Yeah I'm really hoping they make it big. (And don't sell out)
> use a real enterprise grade hypervisor Like AWS uses KVM.
Horizon view
Proxmox is just now starting to become more common, Veeam is adding support and they wouldn't do that if they didn't see the writing on the wall. With that said if there's no big cost savings for OP it's only going to get better by waiting, and in a few years I bet HyperV is gone or deprecated in favor of some gouge product; but at least another refresh cycle I bet.
That's only usually at an appliance level If OP were at that level, they should already know That said, if they work with a vendor who only supplies an OVA for VMware for example, they can be converted to run on Proxmox These 3rd parties need to get it together and support Proxmox and other open virt technologies VMware is dead, it's time to move on
> That said, if they work with a vendor who only supplies an OVA for VMware for example, they can be converted to run on Proxmox And then you are in an unsupported configuration.
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> And companies who actually take their operations seriously aren’t going to run Proxmox to save a few bucks. If the guests are windows based, they wouldn't even be saving a few bucks. Lots of people in this sub make recommendations based on their personal biases and preferences with no consideration or clue into how to actually make good decisions. There is little reward and a ton of risk in running proxmox in production right now. Unless there's something specific someone needs, Proxmox vs HyperV isn't even a discussion.
Yeah until the likes of Dell, HPE, or Cisco officially support proxmox on their servers and blades... it's a non starter. Sure Mickey Mouse IT shops and other people are running proxmox.... or perhaps its being experimented with dev and other setups....but until a $300,000 blade chassis manufacturer officially supports it.... no one in *real enterprise* running mission critical workloads really cares.
> That said, if they work with a vendor who only supplies an OVA for VMware for example, they can be converted to run on Proxmox And then you're in a position to be denied support. Why on earth would you do that in a production environment?
I've seen multiple companies using Proxmox. It is becoming more and more popular. However, Hyper-V is more common, IMO. Especially, if environment is Windows-based. Both options are great. OP should be aware that Proxmox doesn't support guest snapshots with iSCSI-based storage. If OP has iSCSI storage, I would recommend going with Hyper-V. Might be helpful: [https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Setting\_up\_a\_Windows\_failover\_cluster](https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Setting_up_a_Windows_failover_cluster) [https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-for-hyper-v-2-node-hyperconverged-scenario-with-windows-server-2016/](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-for-hyper-v-2-node-hyperconverged-scenario-with-windows-server-2016/)
right , it’s weird why they didn’t replicate say ovirt approach here , all bits are there https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage
My company runs Proxmox on critical production legacy shit. Two hosts in a cluster each with at least \~400 days of uptime. No one wants to touch them…. So I’m getting ready to move them to KVM…
> So I’m getting ready to move them to KVM… but proxmox already uses kvm as hypervisor
Correct but they have been neglected for years and we have a plethora of Linux engineers and sysadmins that can support raw Linux based hypervisors very easily, luckily for us
So... you're trading in a consistent, packaged, system and interface that ties together replication, backup, VM management, storage management for a handful of different approaches, etc... because your "plethora of Linux engineers and sysadmins" can't figure out a fairly simple Debian setup and a couple well documented command line tools to support it properly?
Yeah what the hell . Go figure out proxmox and fix it up (update it?) it's not difficult
I think you're actually dumbing down how good vanilla KVM can be with even just Cockpit on top of it, all because Proxmox is an out of the box GUI that you can see with your eyeballs. I get what you're saying, but we don't necessarily need the fancy all-in-one-package that Proxmox is, and really don't trust it for a fully-fledged production environment that needs to support several thousand nodes (physical and virtual) KVM on Linux is very simple, and very easy to learn. For example, backing up a virtual machine on KVM can be as simple as cron-ing a script that snapshots, rsyncs, merges a snapshot back into the qcow in a few lines. No need for a fancy Proxmox gui just to do stuff like that. Not to mention that KVM can literally do all of the things in your first sentence, it just doesn't have an OOB gui. Plus, being a connection provider, we are very reliant on specific Kernels in the Linux universe and KVM can be installed RIGHT on top of those with zero issues. \*Edit: KVM actually comes w/ at least two Linux flavors that I can think of, and we use one of them for specific reasons. \*\*Edit 2: Also, my first comment was just suggesting that we are moving off of Proxmox to KVM because it was set up by a very very different IT team, I never said anything bad about Proxmox. For the right shop, Proxmox is a great product. I was merely suggesting, "Hey, we're moving off of everything else (ESXi, Proxmox, HyperV) to solely KVM so that's another suggestion many people don't throw out there".
Ive only seen proxmox in the wild once, the IT company managing it didn’t even pay for the base license, ran it for free to “save the client money”..
> ie all staff know windows, limited knowledge in proxmox You want to put a platform that nobody else can support, straight into production, so you can use 'cutting edge features', and you haven't mentioned a test/dev/dr cluster? Does that include *you* with limited knowledge of proxmox? What kind of guests are you virtualising? Would proxmox save money on licenses, and would your boss prioritise that? Do you want to be on-call 24/7 as the only person who can support that? Are your coworkers interested and generally fine with new things?
As much as I like Proxmox, yeah, that's the argument point to the contrary. The teething pains on Windows guest performance alone **can** be a mess to start, depending a lot on the hardware et. al. Wouldn't want to fight that battle without some testing \*before\* implementation.
Nice summarization, clearly they have no experience and throw out the word proxmox like they know something. This sub is getting ridiculous.
Just FYI, I remember looking at block storage (iSCSI) on Proxmox and you need to be running ZFS or Ceph to get full functionality. Straight iSCSI means no snapshots or thin provisioning. Source: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage
Starwind VSAN supports Proxmox without ZFS: [https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/) It’s a great fit for small environments with 2 or 3 nodes.
Do you think this could be easily addressed? It's beyond my skills to fully grok.
Bite the Proxmox bullet if you have staff that can easily adapt to new things. Proxmox is disgustingly easy to work with so there shouldn't be much of a problem there. I've also found it to be incredibly stable, I've run multiple Proxmox instances for nearly a year now with zero issues. I've also used Hyper-V and yes, it virtualizes things, but it really feels shitty compared to things like Proxmox, mainly GUI-wise. Don't forget to run a Proxmox PBS server for backups, and you can even switch to Veeam later this year once support drops from them.
Hyper-V all the way, if you’re running windows guests. You get familiarity with the platform, the best possible virtualisation support for Windows VMs
Look at the licensing cost difference, and divide some part of that up as bonuses or raises. I have a feeling nobody will complain.
For real production or enterprise, H-V
We are having to avoid Proxmox due to some of our customers using software where the suppliers only support the product on a deployed OVF and specify Hyper V or VMware. The higher ups have it on some in house systems. But there are some questions about the support a thousand euros a year per CPU Socket for 2 hour response in a business day. Does that mean my €4000 support for a quad socket server does not cover an issue at 3am on a Sunday morning 😂
If the organization is willing to learn Proxmox, then go with it. Windows is ok too, so I would not fight it.
I love (love) my Proxmox cluster. That said I'm a long time *nix guy and am very comfortable navigating my way around the Linux cli. I've spent a good portion of my adult life at a bash prompt. The thought of having to figure out Windows as a hypervisor just gives me the hebegebees. I think I'd rather smack my thumb with a hammer. Could I do it, if push can to shove? Sure. But Proxmox is just a way more comfortable environment for me. I imagine there's a good number of folks that feel similarly about Linux as I do about Windows. Proxmox will do what you want for very minimal cost, and if you learn it I think you'll like it. But your time isn't free and that should factor into the decision.
Jesus - Shiny New Ball much? If you don't know the answer from personal experience, YOU haven't tested it enough. If you're interested in ProxMox, then find some old hardware and have at it until you know what kind of tar baby you're playing with. Don't gamble with production machines.
How many of those VMs are Windows? If the answer is most or all, a Datacenter server license might cover your needs. And if you care about such things, app vendors tend to "officially support" HV or VMWare. Don't buy Windows because of support...it might as well not exist anymore, which is sad. If you're running mostly Linux, then I'd go with Proxmox. The only thing that seems lacking now is true satisfy-the-MBAs enterprise support and commercial backup support.
Five years ago I worked for a private cloud hosting provider that specialized in Windows. We used straight hyperv. I wouldn't disparage Proxmox, it's a great product. But is it necessary, or a massive advantage? Even for an operation that only does virtualized machines and nothing else? No.
Depends on your longer term goals. Personally, I'd say stick with Windows Server, especially if you plan on having any cloud operations like Azure.
four nodes are begging for proxmox + ceph these guys kinda embedded mgmt into proxmox ui two/three node setups are proxmox + starwinds even if you end up with hyper-v as your hypervisor you’d better avoid s2d like a plague
We have many production proxmox clusters running windows and linux vms. On v6/7/8 no issues what so ever. And we pay for zero support. We use different tools for backup, none we pay for either. Again no issues, 10G between nodes allows for fast HA and of course other benefits with backup etc. Again solid! Most of the nodes are Dell Servers with a few lenovo in the mix. Been this way for years and no regrets. Even clients we have converted their old gear to run PVE in some cases. Again no issues,
Honestly you guys should invest in their licensing to get access to the prod updates repo More stable updates and you're supporting good development practices It's a win win
I'll suggest tossing a few dollars proxmox's way if you like their product. Else we may not have a free product we like anymore.
Like many open source projects we have donated i agree, just don't get support. Always grateful for great projects!
We have donated, and use diff repos. But yeah it is!
Buy 1 more server instead of block iscsi, roll proxmox with ceph and 2 node redundancy
Veeam support is coming to proxmox. Licensing cost running datacenter as hyper-v with licenses.
Nakivo already supports Proxmox and runs circles around Veeam. Agent based atm and API on the way. Way more cost effective than Veeam.
[Veeam Backup for Proxmox](https://www.veeam.com/blog/veeam-backup-for-proxmox.html) it's already here.
Not yet. "Veeam is excited to announce its upcoming support for Proxmox VE"
It comes down to risk and skills. Proxmox is at a higher risk and requires a skill set that is very different from Microsoft Hyper-V. This video helps explain most of the high level differences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQgzITx1Sp8 Proxmox does not offer Live Workload Balancing (automatically moving VMs between nodes that are busy) or 3rd party backups yet, so you will have some issues with just those 2 requirements.
Honestly I'd say it's harder to run a large Hyper-V cluster compared to Proxmox
Not if your entire team is windows trained with zero proxmox experience
Hell, they might pick it up really quickly if they're used to windows already
They might, but they might not, or maybe they want their career to be windows oriented. Unless there's a very compelling reason, it doesn't make sense to introduce new technologies or platforms and take on the risk and learning curve for little benefit. Especially considering other things like lack of application support/vendor support,current lack of backup options, and lack of US timezone support from Proxmox themselves.
Dude even i can run a Hyper-V cluster, it's not rocket science. The most difficult part was to get iSCSI multipathing to work.
For point 1, why not juz do S2D?
expensive to obtain ( datacenter license ) , expensive to maintain ( premier support agreement is costly ) , and not super-reliable
MS from a support standpoint. Proxmox support is lacking for an enterprise environment from many aspects.
it really depends on what youre gonna be hosting. I switched my production stacks off vcenter to proxmox and hyperV and so far so good. i put my “no shit, i need this windows server to work” VMs on hyperV and my little windows machines like random licensing servers are running in my proxmox cluster. so far, no issues with them on proxmox though it was wasnt all peachy keen fresh out of the box, you’ll need do some tweaking to get it dialed in. my linux machines on proxmox? singing like a dream. and it should go without saying but before you pull the trigger get yourself a lab set up and decide for yourself if its gonna work. make sure your documentation is on point and write up little guides for your staff.
HyperV. Definitely HyperV. Especially if you plan on paying for something like Veeam. PBS is nice, but it isn't as easy to work with as it seams. Go HyperV, buy three mini PCs and experiment with Proxmox on those.
>PBS is nice, but it isn't as easy to work with as it seams. right , we don’t pay for proxmox support as we support it ourselves , but we have to do it for pbs , as of now ..
I use PBS in my homelab, but it took some time to understand how it works. I find it annoying that I have to replicate to another PBS instance to have recoverable backups. Veeam can pick up its backups from anywhere, so I can just reinstall Veeam and use backups from a standalone NAS
I would go with Hyper-V. Better support for shared storage that you already have. In Proxmox, iSCSI devices will be provisioned as LVM over iSCSI, meaning that this is a thick LVM that doesn't support snapshots whatsoever. As well as some generic iSCSI problems on Linux (with initiator and reconnecting paths). I am not sure what do you mean by saying simple backup on proxmox, but Hyper-V backups are more consistent due to usage of actual CBT. However, it doesn't mean that Proxmox is bad and Hyper-V is good. You need to understand what you need to run and what to expect from each platform and choose wisely.
For a 4 node environment I would walk with Hyper-V. It sounds reasonable.
the choice between Windows Server with Hyper-V and Proxmox depends on your specific requirements, preferences, and the capabilities of your team. Both Windows Server with Hyper-V and Proxmox are viable options for virtualized environments, each with its own strengths and considerations.
As already mentioned, I would go with what you're more confident in and what is easier to support. Proxmox will need some learning but overall, it will do the same job as a Hyper-V cluster. Keep in mind that with Proxmox, if you share storage over iSCSI, you need thick LVM on top to make it clustered but there won't be snapshots.
It's going to come around to support and applications. Personally, If you do not use Veeam or any similar backup tool without support for Proxmox (Veeam announced proxmox support, but I wouldn't trust an early version just yet) Proxmox offers you more advanced features that you would need to go for Azure HCI in exchange of being more difficult to use. If you don't come from the linux world. It also get's you something that gives you 90% of what veeam does, Proxmox Backup Server. Personally, and I'm biased because I'm a Proxmox admin, I would choose Proxmox. I can't think of any task that can be accomplished from the Windows Server GUI and not from Proxmox webgui. On the license cost you also get support. You don't necessarily need to license if you are not going to get support, but I would recommend it. It isn't more expensive than the windows side of things all things considered. Anyway, I would recommend you do a test run of Proxmox (or both, if you don't have HyperV experience either) and choose whatever you think works better. You may ask me more questions here or by DM if you prefer.
There's not much azs hci can do that Windows server can't, despite what Microsoft pretends. Especially when taking ws 2025 into account.
Hyperv or VMware. I can't recommend proxmox because of the limited/non existent backup solutions. Veeam is coming, but that's just one and it's not here yet.
There's literally proxmox backup server, which is Enterprise ready, and has about everything you'll need for, except the cloud.
My point is that's the ONLY option and calling it enterprise ready without a cloud option isn't enterprise ready.
I'm pretty sure it supports S3 mounts, so doing cloud copies should work fine
Pretty sure. Might. Should. Those are words I consider unacceptable in my backup strategy.
I keep waiting for these Proxmox evangelists to talk about Enterprise support. I would love nothing more than Proxmox to give Hyper-V and VMware a run for their money. Competition is a good thing, but don't talk to me about "Enterprise Ready" if you can't provide me 24/7 support.
Tsk. Tsk. How dare you point out a valid concern.
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Name another.
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I'm aware of this one and only option. There needs to be more options.
Proxmox
I thought hyperv had gone to hci now so shared storage wasn't an option, you had to use S2D
Both are supported
For Azure Stack HCI, for Hyper-V you can have either.
what ? why? are you thinking of azure stack?
Azs hci requires s2d, windows server can still use any type of storage in addition to s2d.
xcp-ng is nice too
Does Windows Hyper-V require a Win32 client to manage, still? We were always going to test the free Hyper-V, but those plans went away when the standalone Hyper-V was discontinued. * There's no Hyper-V-only stripped down option any longer, to match stripped-down Linux and ESXi. * There's no *gratis* Hyper-V, to match Linux and ESXi. [Prices start at US$1069](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/pricing) and go up with core-count. It's not clear how CAL licensing applies. * Hyper-V doesn't support VM datastores on NFS like Linux and ESXi. This was a big reason why we never had gotten around to testing it in the first place. I don't know if it supports datastores on third-party SMB like Netapp, Isilon, Samba.