This product is actually nothing new and has been there since 2007 but it’s now a popular escape route for a lot of VMware customers.
Just similar to our ESX, Proxmox VE is a free, open-source type 1 KVM based hypervisor platform built on Debian Linux.
It uses KVM for VMs and LXC for containers all managed via a web interface. There are no major license features like vSphere Standard or Enterprise in Proxmox so it’s free to run for life. The money comes from subscriptions for software repositories one chooses to use.
There’s no vCenter like thing in Proxmox Ve because every node carries the whole cluster’s config.
Comparing VMware and Proxmox
The platform compares some what like this.
| VMware (VCF / vSphere) | Proxmox |
|---|---|
| VMX | Proxmox Cluster File System (pmxcfs) |
| ESXi | Proxmox VE node (Debian + KVM/QEMU) |
| vCenter Server | None |
| Cluster | Cluster (pvecm), using corosync |
| VMFS / NFS datastores | Storages: LVM-thin, ZFS, NFS, iSCSI + LVM… |
| vSAN | Ceph |
| VirtIO | Para Virtual Driver/ VMXNet3 |
| vSwitch / vDS / port groups | Linux bridges (vmbr0), VLAN tags, SDN |
| NSX | SDN (VXLAN/EVPN) + built-in firewall (lighter) |
| vMotion | Live migration |
| vSphere HA | HA manager |
| DRS | No continuous balancing like DRS |
| vSphere Replication | ZFS Storage Replication |
| VADP | vzdump + Proxmox Backup Server |
| PowerCLI | qm, pct, pvesh, REST API, Terraform, Ansible |
| esxcli software / Lifecycle Manager | apt + the Updates panel |
| Linked vCenters | Proxmox Datacenter Manager |
| Aria (vCF Ops) | Use external tools (Grafana, Terraform) |
Proxmox Cluster File System (pmxcfs)
Arguably this one at first seems like vSAN where it says data is replicated to all nodes but there is a catch in the tech notes where it says the maximum size is 128MB so even though it’s named like a clustered file system, this actually only stores the configuration info of a VM so that is VMX and not the disks.
These includes things like
- /etc/pve/qemu-server/141.conf: VM 141’s settings
- /etc/pve/storage.cfg: the list of storages (datastores)
- /etc/pve/corosync.conf: cluster membership
- /etc/pve/user.cfg: users and permissions
cores: 4
memory: 16384
name: pve-n1
net0: virtio=BC:24:11:AA:BB:CC,bridge=vmbr1
scsi0: Local-2TB:vm-141-disk-0,size=32GStorages
The actually VM files lives on Storages, which is Proxmox equivalent for our vSphere datastores. Similar to our vSphere, we have two kinds of storages
- Local Storage – ZFS
- Shared Storage – NFS, ISCSI, FC, Ceph.
The vSAN equivalent is Ceph so this pools local disks from every node into one replicated storage like our vSAN.
Proxmox Ve is not a full VCF replacement, but for most of what I do day to day, it lines up surprisingly well.