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

• Licensing
• Use Case Focus
• Support Model
• User Interface
• Virtualization
• Containers
• Storage Support
• Backup & Recovery
• Community
• Development Focus

VMware ESXi

• Licensing
• Use Case Focus
• Support Model
• User Interface
• Virtualization
• Containers
• Storage Support
• Backup & Recovery
• Community
• Development Focus

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.