6 ms·

Proxmox virtual environment 9.1 available

92 points by speckx 1y ago

throw0101c 1y ago
Proxmox (and XCP-ng?) seems to be "the" (?) popular alternative to VMware after Broadcom's private equity-fuel cash grab. (Perhaps if you're a Microsoft shop you're looking at Hyper-V?)
- luma 1y ago
  Talking to midmarket and enterprise customers and nobody is taking Proxmox seriously quite yet, I think due to concerns around support availability and long term viability. Hyper-V and Azure Local come up a lot in these conversations if you run a lot of Windows (Healthcare in the US is nearly entirely Windows based). Have some folks kicking tires on OpenShift, which is a HEAVY lift and not much less expensive than modern Broadcom licenses. My personal dark horse favorite right now is HPE VM Essentials. HPE has a terrible track record of being awesome at enterprise software, but their support org is solid and the solution checks a heck of a lot of boxes, including broad support for non-HPE servers, storage, and networking. Solution is priced to move and I expect HPE smells blood in these waters, they're clearly dumping a lot of development resources into the product in this past year.
  - nezirus 1y ago
    I've used them professionally during 0.9 times (2008.) and it was already quite useful and very stable (all advertised features worked). 17 years looks pretty good to me, Proxmox will not go away (neither product or company)
  - commandar 1y ago
    >(Healthcare in the US is nearly entirely Windows based). This wasn't my experience in over a decade in the industry. It's Windows dominant, but our environment was typically around a 70/30 split of Windows/Linux servers. Cerner shops in particular are going to have a larger Linux footprint. Radiology, biomed, interface engines, and med records also tended to have quite a bit of nix infrastructure. One thing that can be said is that containerization has basically zero penetration with any vendors in the space. Pretty much everyone is still doing a pets over cattle model in the industry.
  - nyrikki 1y ago
    HPE VM Essentials and Proxmox are just UI/wrappers/+ on top of kvm/virsh/libvirt for the virtualization side. You can grow out of either by just moving to self hosted, or you can avoid both for the virtualization part if you don't care about the VMware like GUI if you are an automation focused company. If we could do it 20 years ago once VT-x for production Oracle EBS instances for a smaller but publicly traded company with a IT team of 4, almost any midmarket enterprise could do it today, especially with modern tools. It is culture and web-ui requirements and FUD that cause issues, not the underlying products that are stable today, but hidden from view.
    - luma 1y ago
      KVM is awesome enough that there isn’t a lot of room left to differentiate at the hypervisor level. Now the problem is dealing with thousands of the things, so it’s the management layer where the product space is competing.
      - nyrikki 1y ago
        Thus why libvirt was added, it works with KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU etc... but yes most of the tools like ansible only support libvirt_lxc and libvirt_qemu today but it isn't too hard to use for any modern admin with automation experiance. Libvirt is the abstraction API that mostly hides the concrete implementation details. I haven't tried oVirt or the other UIs on top of libvirt, but it seems less painful to me than digging through the Proxmox Perl modules when I hit a limitation of their system, but most people may not. All of those UI's have to make sacrifices to be usable, I just miss the full power of libvirt/qemu/kvm for placement and reduced latency, especially in the era of p vs e cores, dozen's of numa nodes etc... I would argue for long lived machines, automation is the trick for dealing with 1000's of things, but I get that is not always true for others use-cases. I think some people may be supprised by just targeting libvirt vs looking for some web-ui.
    - tlamponi 1y ago
      Correction: In Proxmox VE we're not using virsh/libvirt at all, rather we have our own stack for driving QEMU on a low-level, our in-depth integration, especially with live local storage migration our Backup Servers dirty-bitmap (known as change block tracking in vmware worlds) would be possible in the form we have it. Same w.r.t. our own stack for managing LXC container. The web UI part is actually one of our smaller code bases relative to the whole API and lower level backend code.
- proxysna 1y ago
  Two days ago saw a shop that moved to Incus. Seems to be a viable alternative too.
- baq 1y ago
  um broadcom is publicly traded as $AVGO...?
  - stackskipton 1y ago
    Plenty of people describe Broadcom as "Publicly traded Private Equity"
    - baq 1y ago
      now that is something I can totally get behind
  - throw0101c 1y ago
    So is $KKR: > KKR & Co. Inc., also known as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., is an American global private equity and investment company. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KKR_%26_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KKR_%26_Co. You can have a public company that invests in private companies, as opposed to investing in publicly listed companies (like $BRK/Buffett does (in addition to PE stuff)).
- zamadatix 1y ago
  Nutanix is popular with traditional larger enterprise VMware type customers, Proxmox is popular with the smaller or homelabber refugees. Exceptions exist to each of course.
  - fuzzylightbulb 1y ago
    That people consolidated their business atop VMware's hypervisor, got screwed by Broadcom, and as a result are moving everything to Nutanix (from whom they need to buy the hypervisor, the compute stack, the storage stack, etc.) is insane to me.
    - zamadatix 1y ago
      Most don't even consider the amounts as getting screwed, just enough change that on the next refresh cycle it was worth switching to a different provider. For a lot of these places it was just 10-15 years ago they went from 0 VMs to 80%+ VMs so they aren't worried about needing to move around, just the quality of the support contract etc.
veidr 1y ago
Nah. Incus. Sorry, but I bought Proxmox 7, but it is not comparable. Incus does everything (and more) with better interface, WAY better reliability, and also not like a hundred EUR or whatever. (100 EUR is fine with me if better, but not if not better...)
- PentiumBug 1y ago
  Interesting. Does Incus has support for storing virtual machine assets in a NFS store so they could be easily migrated?
- unethical_ban 1y ago
  Proxmox is free, too. Incus looks nice, though it looks to be more API driven , at least from the landing page. I can't attest to Proxmox in a production/cluster environment but (barring GPU passthrough) it's very accessible for homelab and small network.
  - Semaphor 1y ago
    GPU passthrough works fine? I use that for transcoding in Jellyfin.
    - unethical_ban 1y ago
      I don't remember if I tried and failed, or if it seemed too much for me... I have an Arc A series; if you have a verified guide I would like to take a look!
      - zer00eyz 1y ago
        This may have more to do with your underlying hardware than proxmox itself. It's been forever, but to do passthrough you need proper bios support and configuration.
      - throw0101c 1y ago
        Some folks got Intel Arc working: * https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/pci-passthrough-arc-a380-into-vm.146964/ https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/pci-passthrough-arc-a380-i...
jmward01 1y ago
Watching hypervisors slowly improve over the last few years has been amazing. They aren't quite to the point that I will install them under any new hardware I buy and then put my daily driver OS on top, but they are very close. I think a strong focus on creating 'the OS under your OS' experience seamless could open up a lot more here.
- rtaylorgarlock 1y ago
  For many folk's workflows, I'd wager that hypervisors are there and ready. I had a nice time setting up xcp-ng before deciding microk8s fits my needs more betterer; they're just plum good, well documented, and blazing fast.
  - jmward01 1y ago
    I think the possibilities are huge with this area. I'd love to see more 'manager' layers that build on top of any 'cloud' system, even a local one, to give you a standard stack that is easy to move. Imagine something that lives at the hypervisor level (that you trust and was mature) taking control of your various cloud accounts to merge them and make it easy to migrate/leave one provider for another. I know that is the promise of terraform but we all want a good, consistent, interface to play with and then build the automation tools on top of. Maybe that is a good direction for proxmox? integrating with cloud providers in a seamless way. Anyway, a lot of promise in this area no matter the direction it takes.
- luma 1y ago
  VMware has been so good and reasonably priced for so long that there hasn't been a competitive market in the enterprise virtualization space for the past two decades. In a way, I think Broadcom's moves here might be healthy for the enterprise datacenter longer term, it has created the opportunity for others to step in and broadened the ecosystem significantly.
- zer00eyz 1y ago
  I'm not sure I would want my daily driver to be a hypervisor... Whats controlling audio, do I really need audio kernel extensions on my hypervisor? Whos in charge when I shut the lid on my laptop... But the moment you stop trying to do everything locally Proxmox, as it is today, is a dream. It's easy enough to spin up a VM, throw a clients docker/podman + other insanity onto it and have a running dev instance in minutes. It's easy enough to work remotely in your favorite IDE/dev env. DO I need to "try something wild", clone it... build a new one... back it up and restore if it doesn't work... Do I need to emulate production at a more fine grained level than what docker can provide: easy enough to build something that looks like production on my proxmox box. And when I'm done with all that work... my daily driver laptop and desktop remain free of cruft and clutter.
hendersoon 1y ago
So with support for OCI container images, does this mean I can run docker images as LXCs natively in proxmox? I guess it's an entirely manual process, no mature orchestration like portainer or even docker-compose, no easy upgrades, manually setting up bind mounts, etc. It would be a nice first step.
- _rs 1y ago
  Also hoping that this work continues and tooling is made available. I suppose eventually someone could even make a wrapper around it that implements Docker's remote API
- Havoc 1y ago
  There is a vid showing the process on their youtube https://youtu.be/4-u4x9L6k1s?t=21 https://youtu.be/4-u4x9L6k1s?t=21 >no mature orchestration Seems to borrow the LXC tooling...which has a decent command line tool at least. You could in theory automate against that. Presumably it'll mature
Lapalux 1y ago
Been waiting to update from v8. Time might be right now
lysace 1y ago
15-20 years ago this wouldn't have been a company. It would have been a strong but informal open collaboration where smart and just people funded by various entities around the world kept it running. Then the opportunity to get rich by offering an open source product combined with closed source extras+support was invented. I don't like this new world. Edit: Somewhere along the line, we also lost the concept of having a sysadmin/developer person working at like a municipality contributring like 20% of their time towards maintenance of such projects. Invaluable when keeping things running.
- npteljes 1y ago
  What do you find wrong with "this new world"? For context, I'm using their free offering for my home server, for 6-7 years now. Happy as a clam.
  - lysace 1y ago
    It enables Oracle-like behavior. Once you're locked in as commercial user they can do whatever they want. Remember: Not all commercial users are FAANG rich. Counties/local municipalities count as commercial users, as an example.
    - npteljes 1y ago
      But in many cases, like Proxmox, there is nothing proprietary. What they provide is the glue, the polish, the interface that ties together the technologies they build on. If they began to be nasty, you can just leave (or even, continue to use it however long you like). In general, I don't think this is a threat. I think the problems begin with proprietary offerings, like they so often do in the cloud. Then's the time when vendor lock-in takes its toll. But even with AWS, if you stick to open interfaces, it's easy to leave.
- Volundr 1y ago
  Funny enough, Proxmox VE is 17 years old. I want to say it was ballpark 13-14 years ago I was using it to replace ESXi to get features (HA/Live migration) that only came with expensive licensing. 15-20 years ago there were definitely companies doing exactly this.
SteveNuts 1y ago
The only thing missing making Proxmox difficult in traditional environment is a replacement for VMware's VMFS (cluster aware VM file system). Lots and lots of organizations already have SAN/storage fabric networks presenting block storage over the network which was heavily used for VMware environments. You could use NFS if your arrays support it, but MPIO block storage via iscsi is ubiquitous in my experience.
- whalesalad 1y ago
  The Proxmox answer to this is Ceph - https://ceph.io/en/ https://ceph.io/en/
  - SteveNuts 1y ago
    Not really, that works if you want to have converged storage in your hypervisors, but most large VMWare deployments I've seen use external storage from remote arrays.
    - whalesalad 1y ago
      Proxmox works fine with iSCSI.
      - SteveNuts 1y ago
        Shared across a cluster of multiple hosts, such that you can hot migrate VMs? I am not aware of that being possible in Proxmox the same way you can in VMware with VMFS.
        skibbityboop 1y ago
        It's not like VMFS (not a cluster filesystem), for Proxmox+iSCSI you get a large LVM PV that gets sliced up into volumes for your VMs. All of your Proxmox nodes are connected to that same LVM PV and you can live migrate your VMs around all you wish, have HA policies so if a node dies its VMs start up right away on a surviving node, etc. You lose snapshots (but can have your SAN doing snaps, of course) and a few other small things I can't recall right now, but overall it works great. Have had zero troubles.
gigel82 1y ago
What is this "application containers" BS, just add native docker stack support. Most folks in the self hosting community already deploy nested dockers in LXCs, just add native support so we can cut out the middle man and squeeze out that indirection.
- spants 1y ago
  docker errors or escapes taking down the root system? Not for me....
  - auguzanellato 1y ago
    Docker is mostly based on the same stuff that LXC uses under the hood.
- tlamponi 1y ago
  It makes no sense to add an extra layer, and we definitively do not want to make us and our users dependent of docker project. There exist many OCI runtimes, and our container toolkit already provides a (ball parked) 90% feature overlap with them. Maintaining two stacks here is just needless extra work and asking for extra pain for us devs and our users, so no, thanks. That said, PVE is not OCI runtime compatible yet, that's why this is marked as tech preview, but it can be still useful for many that control their OCI images themselves or have an existing automation stack that can drive the current implementation. That said, we plan to work more on this in the future, but for the midterm it will be not that interesting for those that want a very simple hand-off approach (let's call it "casual hobby homelabber"), or want to replace some more complex stack with it; but I think we'll get there.
  - gigel82 1y ago
    People stuck with Docker for a reason, even after they became user hostile. Almost every selfhosted project in existence provides a docker-compose.yml that's easy to expand and configure to immediately get started. None provide generic OCI containers to run in generic OCI runtimes. I understand sticking with compatibility at that layer from an "ideal goal" POV, but that is unlikely to see a lot of adoption precisely because applications don't target generic OCI runtimes.
ryandrake 1y ago
Somehow, their web developer managed to break scrolling on Safari, so I am unable to navigate the linked site. If anyone else was looking for a list of what has changed in recent releases, it can be found at https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Roadmap https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Roadmap
- itopaloglu83 1y ago
  There’s a cookie popup, so maybe something on your browser is removing the layer and causing all the events to be ignored.
dang 1y ago
Related ongoing thread: Adventures in upgrading Proxmox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45981666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45981666 - Nov 2025 (10 comments)
m463 1y ago
I've always just clean-installed then copied the containers/vms using vzdump and pct restore/qmrestore I learned stuff like this years ago with upgrades to debian/ubuntu/etc - upgrading a distribution is a mess, and I've learned not to trust it.
rcarmo 1y ago
Still no way to use clound-init for LXCs (apparently). But upgrading from 9.0 on my four servers went fine, zero issues (including ZFS).

92 points by speckx 1y ago

Proxmox (and XCP-ng?) seems to be "the" (?) popular alternative to VMware after Broadcom's private equity-fuel cash grab. (Perhaps if you're a Microsoft shop you're looking at Hyper-V?)

luma 1y ago
Talking to midmarket and enterprise customers and nobody is taking Proxmox seriously quite yet, I think due to concerns around support availability and long term viability. Hyper-V and Azure Local come up a lot in these conversations if you run a lot of Windows (Healthcare in the US is nearly entirely Windows based). Have some folks kicking tires on OpenShift, which is a HEAVY lift and not much less expensive than modern Broadcom licenses. My personal dark horse favorite right now is HPE VM Essentials. HPE has a terrible track record of being awesome at enterprise software, but their support org is solid and the solution checks a heck of a lot of boxes, including broad support for non-HPE servers, storage, and networking. Solution is priced to move and I expect HPE smells blood in these waters, they're clearly dumping a lot of development resources into the product in this past year.
- nezirus 1y ago
  I've used them professionally during 0.9 times (2008.) and it was already quite useful and very stable (all advertised features worked). 17 years looks pretty good to me, Proxmox will not go away (neither product or company)
- commandar 1y ago
  >(Healthcare in the US is nearly entirely Windows based). This wasn't my experience in over a decade in the industry. It's Windows dominant, but our environment was typically around a 70/30 split of Windows/Linux servers. Cerner shops in particular are going to have a larger Linux footprint. Radiology, biomed, interface engines, and med records also tended to have quite a bit of nix infrastructure. One thing that can be said is that containerization has basically zero penetration with any vendors in the space. Pretty much everyone is still doing a pets over cattle model in the industry.
- nyrikki 1y ago
  HPE VM Essentials and Proxmox are just UI/wrappers/+ on top of kvm/virsh/libvirt for the virtualization side. You can grow out of either by just moving to self hosted, or you can avoid both for the virtualization part if you don't care about the VMware like GUI if you are an automation focused company. If we could do it 20 years ago once VT-x for production Oracle EBS instances for a smaller but publicly traded company with a IT team of 4, almost any midmarket enterprise could do it today, especially with modern tools. It is culture and web-ui requirements and FUD that cause issues, not the underlying products that are stable today, but hidden from view.
  - luma 1y ago
    KVM is awesome enough that there isn’t a lot of room left to differentiate at the hypervisor level. Now the problem is dealing with thousands of the things, so it’s the management layer where the product space is competing.
    - nyrikki 1y ago
      Thus why libvirt was added, it works with KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU etc... but yes most of the tools like ansible only support libvirt_lxc and libvirt_qemu today but it isn't too hard to use for any modern admin with automation experiance. Libvirt is the abstraction API that mostly hides the concrete implementation details. I haven't tried oVirt or the other UIs on top of libvirt, but it seems less painful to me than digging through the Proxmox Perl modules when I hit a limitation of their system, but most people may not. All of those UI's have to make sacrifices to be usable, I just miss the full power of libvirt/qemu/kvm for placement and reduced latency, especially in the era of p vs e cores, dozen's of numa nodes etc... I would argue for long lived machines, automation is the trick for dealing with 1000's of things, but I get that is not always true for others use-cases. I think some people may be supprised by just targeting libvirt vs looking for some web-ui.
  - tlamponi 1y ago
    Correction: In Proxmox VE we're not using virsh/libvirt at all, rather we have our own stack for driving QEMU on a low-level, our in-depth integration, especially with live local storage migration our Backup Servers dirty-bitmap (known as change block tracking in vmware worlds) would be possible in the form we have it. Same w.r.t. our own stack for managing LXC container. The web UI part is actually one of our smaller code bases relative to the whole API and lower level backend code.
proxysna 1y ago
Two days ago saw a shop that moved to Incus. Seems to be a viable alternative too.
baq 1y ago
um broadcom is publicly traded as $AVGO...?
- stackskipton 1y ago
  Plenty of people describe Broadcom as "Publicly traded Private Equity"
  - baq 1y ago
    now that is something I can totally get behind
- throw0101c 1y ago
  So is $KKR: > KKR & Co. Inc., also known as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., is an American global private equity and investment company. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KKR_%26_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KKR_%26_Co. You can have a public company that invests in private companies, as opposed to investing in publicly listed companies (like $BRK/Buffett does (in addition to PE stuff)).
zamadatix 1y ago
Nutanix is popular with traditional larger enterprise VMware type customers, Proxmox is popular with the smaller or homelabber refugees. Exceptions exist to each of course.
- fuzzylightbulb 1y ago
  That people consolidated their business atop VMware's hypervisor, got screwed by Broadcom, and as a result are moving everything to Nutanix (from whom they need to buy the hypervisor, the compute stack, the storage stack, etc.) is insane to me.
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    Most don't even consider the amounts as getting screwed, just enough change that on the next refresh cycle it was worth switching to a different provider. For a lot of these places it was just 10-15 years ago they went from 0 VMs to 80%+ VMs so they aren't worried about needing to move around, just the quality of the support contract etc.

veidr 1y ago

Nah. Incus. Sorry, but I bought Proxmox 7, but it is not comparable. Incus does everything (and more) with better interface, WAY better reliability, and also not like a hundred EUR or whatever. (100 EUR is fine with me if better, but not if not better...)

PentiumBug 1y ago
Interesting. Does Incus has support for storing virtual machine assets in a NFS store so they could be easily migrated?
unethical_ban 1y ago
Proxmox is free, too. Incus looks nice, though it looks to be more API driven , at least from the landing page. I can't attest to Proxmox in a production/cluster environment but (barring GPU passthrough) it's very accessible for homelab and small network.
- Semaphor 1y ago
  GPU passthrough works fine? I use that for transcoding in Jellyfin.
  - unethical_ban 1y ago
    I don't remember if I tried and failed, or if it seemed too much for me... I have an Arc A series; if you have a verified guide I would like to take a look!
    - zer00eyz 1y ago
      This may have more to do with your underlying hardware than proxmox itself. It's been forever, but to do passthrough you need proper bios support and configuration.
    - throw0101c 1y ago
      Some folks got Intel Arc working: * https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/pci-passthrough-arc-a380-into-vm.146964/ https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/pci-passthrough-arc-a380-i...

jmward01 1y ago

Watching hypervisors slowly improve over the last few years has been amazing. They aren't quite to the point that I will install them under any new hardware I buy and then put my daily driver OS on top, but they are very close. I think a strong focus on creating 'the OS under your OS' experience seamless could open up a lot more here.

rtaylorgarlock 1y ago
For many folk's workflows, I'd wager that hypervisors are there and ready. I had a nice time setting up xcp-ng before deciding microk8s fits my needs more betterer; they're just plum good, well documented, and blazing fast.
- jmward01 1y ago
  I think the possibilities are huge with this area. I'd love to see more 'manager' layers that build on top of any 'cloud' system, even a local one, to give you a standard stack that is easy to move. Imagine something that lives at the hypervisor level (that you trust and was mature) taking control of your various cloud accounts to merge them and make it easy to migrate/leave one provider for another. I know that is the promise of terraform but we all want a good, consistent, interface to play with and then build the automation tools on top of. Maybe that is a good direction for proxmox? integrating with cloud providers in a seamless way. Anyway, a lot of promise in this area no matter the direction it takes.
luma 1y ago
VMware has been so good and reasonably priced for so long that there hasn't been a competitive market in the enterprise virtualization space for the past two decades. In a way, I think Broadcom's moves here might be healthy for the enterprise datacenter longer term, it has created the opportunity for others to step in and broadened the ecosystem significantly.
zer00eyz 1y ago
I'm not sure I would want my daily driver to be a hypervisor... Whats controlling audio, do I really need audio kernel extensions on my hypervisor? Whos in charge when I shut the lid on my laptop... But the moment you stop trying to do everything locally Proxmox, as it is today, is a dream. It's easy enough to spin up a VM, throw a clients docker/podman + other insanity onto it and have a running dev instance in minutes. It's easy enough to work remotely in your favorite IDE/dev env. DO I need to "try something wild", clone it... build a new one... back it up and restore if it doesn't work... Do I need to emulate production at a more fine grained level than what docker can provide: easy enough to build something that looks like production on my proxmox box. And when I'm done with all that work... my daily driver laptop and desktop remain free of cruft and clutter.

hendersoon 1y ago

So with support for OCI container images, does this mean I can run docker images as LXCs natively in proxmox? I guess it's an entirely manual process, no mature orchestration like portainer or even docker-compose, no easy upgrades, manually setting up bind mounts, etc. It would be a nice first step.

_rs 1y ago
Also hoping that this work continues and tooling is made available. I suppose eventually someone could even make a wrapper around it that implements Docker's remote API
Havoc 1y ago
There is a vid showing the process on their youtube https://youtu.be/4-u4x9L6k1s?t=21 https://youtu.be/4-u4x9L6k1s?t=21 >no mature orchestration Seems to borrow the LXC tooling...which has a decent command line tool at least. You could in theory automate against that. Presumably it'll mature

Lapalux 1y ago

Been waiting to update from v8. Time might be right now

lysace 1y ago

15-20 years ago this wouldn't have been a company. It would have been a strong but informal open collaboration where smart and just people funded by various entities around the world kept it running. Then the opportunity to get rich by offering an open source product combined with closed source extras+support was invented. I don't like this new world. Edit: Somewhere along the line, we also lost the concept of having a sysadmin/developer person working at like a municipality contributring like 20% of their time towards maintenance of such projects. Invaluable when keeping things running.

npteljes 1y ago
What do you find wrong with "this new world"? For context, I'm using their free offering for my home server, for 6-7 years now. Happy as a clam.
- lysace 1y ago
  It enables Oracle-like behavior. Once you're locked in as commercial user they can do whatever they want. Remember: Not all commercial users are FAANG rich. Counties/local municipalities count as commercial users, as an example.
  - npteljes 1y ago
    But in many cases, like Proxmox, there is nothing proprietary. What they provide is the glue, the polish, the interface that ties together the technologies they build on. If they began to be nasty, you can just leave (or even, continue to use it however long you like). In general, I don't think this is a threat. I think the problems begin with proprietary offerings, like they so often do in the cloud. Then's the time when vendor lock-in takes its toll. But even with AWS, if you stick to open interfaces, it's easy to leave.
Volundr 1y ago
Funny enough, Proxmox VE is 17 years old. I want to say it was ballpark 13-14 years ago I was using it to replace ESXi to get features (HA/Live migration) that only came with expensive licensing. 15-20 years ago there were definitely companies doing exactly this.

SteveNuts 1y ago

The only thing missing making Proxmox difficult in traditional environment is a replacement for VMware's VMFS (cluster aware VM file system). Lots and lots of organizations already have SAN/storage fabric networks presenting block storage over the network which was heavily used for VMware environments. You could use NFS if your arrays support it, but MPIO block storage via iscsi is ubiquitous in my experience.

whalesalad 1y ago
The Proxmox answer to this is Ceph - https://ceph.io/en/ https://ceph.io/en/
- SteveNuts 1y ago
  Not really, that works if you want to have converged storage in your hypervisors, but most large VMWare deployments I've seen use external storage from remote arrays.
  - whalesalad 1y ago
    Proxmox works fine with iSCSI.
    - SteveNuts 1y ago
      Shared across a cluster of multiple hosts, such that you can hot migrate VMs? I am not aware of that being possible in Proxmox the same way you can in VMware with VMFS.
      - skibbityboop 1y ago
        It's not like VMFS (not a cluster filesystem), for Proxmox+iSCSI you get a large LVM PV that gets sliced up into volumes for your VMs. All of your Proxmox nodes are connected to that same LVM PV and you can live migrate your VMs around all you wish, have HA policies so if a node dies its VMs start up right away on a surviving node, etc. You lose snapshots (but can have your SAN doing snaps, of course) and a few other small things I can't recall right now, but overall it works great. Have had zero troubles.

gigel82 1y ago

What is this "application containers" BS, just add native docker stack support. Most folks in the self hosting community already deploy nested dockers in LXCs, just add native support so we can cut out the middle man and squeeze out that indirection.

spants 1y ago
docker errors or escapes taking down the root system? Not for me....
- auguzanellato 1y ago
  Docker is mostly based on the same stuff that LXC uses under the hood.
tlamponi 1y ago
It makes no sense to add an extra layer, and we definitively do not want to make us and our users dependent of docker project. There exist many OCI runtimes, and our container toolkit already provides a (ball parked) 90% feature overlap with them. Maintaining two stacks here is just needless extra work and asking for extra pain for us devs and our users, so no, thanks. That said, PVE is not OCI runtime compatible yet, that's why this is marked as tech preview, but it can be still useful for many that control their OCI images themselves or have an existing automation stack that can drive the current implementation. That said, we plan to work more on this in the future, but for the midterm it will be not that interesting for those that want a very simple hand-off approach (let's call it "casual hobby homelabber"), or want to replace some more complex stack with it; but I think we'll get there.
- gigel82 1y ago
  People stuck with Docker for a reason, even after they became user hostile. Almost every selfhosted project in existence provides a docker-compose.yml that's easy to expand and configure to immediately get started. None provide generic OCI containers to run in generic OCI runtimes. I understand sticking with compatibility at that layer from an "ideal goal" POV, but that is unlikely to see a lot of adoption precisely because applications don't target generic OCI runtimes.

ryandrake 1y ago

Somehow, their web developer managed to break scrolling on Safari, so I am unable to navigate the linked site. If anyone else was looking for a list of what has changed in recent releases, it can be found at https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Roadmap https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Roadmap

itopaloglu83 1y ago
There’s a cookie popup, so maybe something on your browser is removing the layer and causing all the events to be ignored.

dang 1y ago

Related ongoing thread: Adventures in upgrading Proxmox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45981666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45981666 - Nov 2025 (10 comments)

m463 1y ago

I've always just clean-installed then copied the containers/vms using vzdump and pct restore/qmrestore I learned stuff like this years ago with upgrades to debian/ubuntu/etc - upgrading a distribution is a mess, and I've learned not to trust it.

rcarmo 1y ago

Still no way to use clound-init for LXCs (apparently). But upgrading from 9.0 on my four servers went fine, zero issues (including ZFS).