
Proxmox VE 6.1 – Open-Source virtualization platform - tlamponi
https://www.proxmox.com/en/news/press-releases/proxmox-ve-6-1
======
gboone
Can't say enough about how I appreciate Proxmox. I had tried Xenserver but it
didn't play well with my setup. Proxmox is robust from GUI and CLI. I run two
small businesses from my home and the setup allows me to efficiently host
pFsense, a mail server, multiple web and DB servers.

But even better for me, the ease and ability to pass through a GPU and run
Windows in a VM while using modifiable resources makes it so flexible.

I've been a customer for over two years and they provide support with a super
reasonable yearly subscription of just $99. The forum is active and the
updates are recent and up to speed.

~~~
dan_quixote
> Proxmox is robust from GUI and CLI.

I'm looking through the CLI docs now and I can't even figure out how to launch
a VM. At face value, it doesn't look like a good CLI (well actually they list
a bunch of CLI tools for VM management). Am I just looking in the wrong place?

I also want the ability to run setup commands (think AWS user-data) at first
boot. The docs indicate user-data support though cloud-init, but I see forum
discussions that indicate that you can only set up basic things like IP
addresses, SSH keys, etc. Is there a programmatic way to inject bash commands
at first boot?

~~~
linsomniac
You might want to consider ganeti. It works great from the command-line. There
is a GUI for it as a separate project, but I've never used it. I've been
running ganeti in dev/stg for 6-7 years and production for around 4, and it's
been extremely solid.

As far as running bash commands at first boot, in ganeti I have customized
their "create" script to include a bash script that installs some packages,
clones our Ansible setup, and then runs Ansible to set the machine up. We
respin our entire staging cluster every other day (even machines one day, odd
the next).

[http://www.ganeti.org/](http://www.ganeti.org/)

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babayega2
Last year I had applied for a job where we would have to manage Windows
servers. Stuff with Active Directory and storage... I'm Linux guy but have
extended experience in WinServer 2012. I just set up a server, boot ProxMox,
spun up as many as Win Server 2016 instances I wanted to experiment with all
the aspects of the new Win Server and guess what? I was second in the job
interview. Thank you ProxMox. You is the best.

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F00Fbug
I can't say enough good things about PVE! I started managing VMware in 2003
and ESXi is a wonderful product. I was running ESXi at home on the free
license which only gives you eight vCPUs (if I remember correctly). After
hitting that limit, I slowly decided to move to PVE. I was able to migrate my
machines quite easily and have never looked back. For so many use cases, PVE
is just as good as ESXi. If you're looking to virtualize and have relatively
straightforward requirements, it's worth a look. Free is great and it's rock
solid. I made that switch three years ago and haven't had a single issue.

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Evidlo
One thing I've never understood with Proxmox is why networking can't be
configured host-side. It seems you are expected to go into each new VM and
manually set network settings. Why not have a DHCP server on the host that
hands out prescribed addresses by VM id?

If Proxmox could do this in addition to maintaining port forwarding to these
VMs I would be happy.

~~~
adamfeldman
I've set up Proxmox a couple times. I do exactly what you described, using
dnsmasq. There are a few blog posts out there, this is one [1] I used for
inspiration.

I too wish it was a built-in Proxmox feature, or at least officially
documented...

[1]: [https://blog.jenningsga.com/private-network-with-
proxmox/](https://blog.jenningsga.com/private-network-with-proxmox/)

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slifin
I installed Proxmox at a previous job, doing snapshots in seconds on a
database container was nice for backups and the UI makes you feel informed and
in control

I would recommend it for most businesses honestly

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gbuk2013
Proxmox is awesome. :)

Back several years ago I worked on a project to build a system for making
demos of network solutions. We ran Proxmox inside of an ESX virtual machine
and then used it to virtualise various pieces of the demo architecture. The
ESX image could simply be coped to an external drive for the consultant to
use.

Ultimately the company went for a central-lab demo environment instead but it
was pretty cool anyway.

The demo itself was stored as a bunch of Ansible playbooks and assorted scrips
so it was Git-friendly, to be applied to a generic ESX template.

We built cool things like a canvas-based Visio-like UI that could be used to
define VMs / containers / networks and provision at the touch of a button.

Similarly the solution itself would be visualised using a diagram that
supported dynamic components like links showing traffic, counters, graphs etc
that would show traffic running between the VMs inside the demo.

We also had a central server that would store pre-created demo templates using
Ceph that could checked-out for use via a web UI.

Fun times :)

~~~
walterbell
_> We built cool things like a canvas-based Visio-like UI that could be used
to define VMs / containers / networks and provision at the touch of a button.
Similarly the solution itself would be visualised using a diagram that
supported dynamic components like links showing traffic, counters, graphs etc
that would show traffic running between the VMs inside the demo._

Nifty! What frontend/backend dev stack did you use? Does anything like that
exist in OSS, for any virt platform?

~~~
gbuk2013
No, I built it for this project.

The canvas diagram was plain JS and for logos we used SVGs from company
official PowerPoint icon pack to make it look consistent.

The backend was Node.js that ran Ansible playbooks that provisioned things via
Proxmox API and then configured the VMs as needed.

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mvip
Love Proxmox. It has its quirks but overall a great platform for home usage
(labs etc) and for small businesses.

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tyingq
Probably one of the more notable current applications that still use a lot of
Perl. The admin interface is mostly Perl, as are many of the command line
utilities.

~~~
dan_quixote
Zoneminder uses a lot of Perl still IIRC.

~~~
tyingq
Yep. Also, Booking.com is probably the most notable current Perl user.

~~~
_jal
Craigslist.

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roboyoshi
I've been running proxmox since v3.0 with lots of success. I admit that back
then you could break stuff easily if you did not know what you're doing. Over
the time I've been running it continuously with every version in my homelab
and it just got more awesome. I tried ESXI and Microsoft Server.. But in the
end I always went back to Proxmox and the very stable debian that runs it. Now
with the latest version ZFS encryption is also native and I have pretty much
everything I could ask for. Can only recommend!

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cremp
Proxmox is good with the large exception of high speed interconnects.

If I have Mellanox IB cards in my servers, proxmox fails to handle ipoib
without a _lot_ of legwork. Compare that to something like oVirt; that
supports it out of the box.

There is very little incentive for me to recommend a proxmox subscription to
any of my clients because having >= 40 gbit interconnects is far better than
using lags on single gbit. High traffic internal applications, (and
migration!) benefit so much from those interconnects.

~~~
arminiusreturns
I have run dual 100gb mellanox in it with no problems without the IPoIB. It
seems a pretty specific problem that is probably related to the mellanox cards
and not to proxmox, as similar bugs show up with mellanox in oVirt.

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zoobab
The company behind it in Vienna tried to recruit developers for 3200eur
bruto/month, I found this super low compared to current standards.

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sekh60
I had a brief stint with proxmox a few weeks ago and didn't like it much. I
didn't like the nag popup when you don't have a subscription (and I had
installed the nosubscription package!). I migrated to it to see if it would be
easier to manage than OpenStack, but I honestly found OpenStack easier to deal
with, probably due to familiarity.

~~~
roboyoshi
Yeah that nag is my only nitpick with Proxmox. It's a bit too much in the face
everytime I login. You can easily disable it with a code snippet, but I think
the devs should just advertise the non-subscription model differently.

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self_awareness
I've used Proxmox on my dedicated host and it was working really well, however
one problem I've encountered is that it doesn't really play well with guest
OpenBSD (guest randomly was hanging, with no apparent pattern). But Linux and
Windows worked perfectly.

~~~
wil421
I agree, FreeBSD (FreeNAS) doesn’t play well with it and iSCSI did not work
well according to a lot of forum postings and blogs. I wanted a robust NAS and
doing it through a VM did not provide the peace of mind I was looking.

The only upside is now I can build a dedicated visualization machine or grab
some old enterprise hardware from Craigslist. My wife is not so amused.

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cevn
I gave proxmox a solid try for virtualizing a mattermost instance. But it was
just way too slow compared to bare metal. Chats took seconds to load instead
of ms. I'm sure there's some explanation for it but I couldn't be assed to
figure it out and reverted.

~~~
isodude
You were probably missing the virtualization flag if it is that slow.

~~~
cevn
Hmm possible. I will give that a try.

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anon9001
Proxmox is pretty cool, but it doesn't make sense unless you're running many
machines and utilizing ceph. For a home user, Debian (or some other stable
distro) is still going to be the best distro for doing hypervisor stuff.

~~~
BuildTheRobots
I'd disagree entirely. If you want an extremely easy to use gui that gives you
access to KVM and LXC virtualisations, along with easy access web remote
consoles, snapshots and backups, then Proxmox has been a fantastic go-to for
over 6 years.

My only objection is that it's a 'full-fat' linux distro that needs to run off
a real disk (unlike ESXi), however on every other level it's far superior.

~~~
dngray
> _Proxmox is pretty cool, but it doesn 't make sense unless you're running
> many machines and utilizing ceph. For a home user, Debian (or some other
> stable distro) is still going to be the best distro for doing hypervisor
> stuff._

> _My only objection is that it 's a 'full-fat' linux distro that needs to run
> off a real disk (unlike ESXi), however on every other level it's far
> superior._

Why not Alpine Linux? I use that in diskless mode
[https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Installation#diskless_mode](https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Installation#diskless_mode)

~~~
tfigment
They mean proxmox requires full debian. Pretty sure its not a choice. In VMs
you can run anything qemu runs. Also no Docker. The devs are opinionated, not
that that is necessarily an issue.

~~~
roboyoshi
Docker has been on the wishlist for a while but it seems like the developers
refuse to integrate it. I just installed docker-ce manually and added
portainer as a systemd service. That way I can manage containers with a 2nd
webui.

~~~
mikepurvis
What are your thoughts on this setup vs just docker+portainer on regular
Ubuntu LTS, or even a dedicated Docker distro like Rancher?

I had a previous home server built around docker, and found it fiddly to get
right— most of the services I wanted to deploy didn't already have containers,
and there was a lot of outer config stuff to play with, getting the containers
to restart properly on reboot, getting DNS to resolve them, getting the right
data directories set up as binds.

But that was also in 2016, so it's likely things are a lot better now, and
conversely, it's not necessarily clear that a VM-based approach would be a lot
better in some of these areas.

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MayeulC
I'm currently using Yunohost, but I'm finding the system a bit brittle for
some use-cases, and some choices rather arbitrary (which was also the point,
as I initially chose it to spend less time managing my server).

I would like something a bit more fleximble, and was seriously thinking about
jumping to Guix or Nix. Does any of you have any input on this? Proxmox is
also a candidate, as I could run my old Yunohost side-by-side with Nix, Guix,
and others, I guess. I'm just afraid of overcomplexifying my nginx config.

Allso, if I run Guix/Nix on Proxmox, I'll lose the declarative config
advantage... Is the opposite possible?

~~~
hippich
I am sure usecases are slightly different for these two. At least for me
personally, "plug and play" offer was the key - so I could easily move stuff
around and not think about it. And it has browser access so non-tech people
can use email/Nextcloud/etc.

But perhaps Yunohost can be used to model what you have in mind, and once
solidified, use it as a base to build VM with precise setup.

Ansible is perhaps the closest you can get to declarative config... See
"sovereign" on github - I migrated from it to Yunohost, as things kept
breaking and I was looking hands off setup (hence Yunohost), but given that
Sovereign is ansible-based - perhaps you can leverage it.

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mlrtime
Proxmox running on a nuc i7 with 64GB of ram and a fast nvme drive. The system
is very fast and takes very little space. Just wish I had an extra nic.

~~~
roboyoshi
The Hades Canyon NUC actually has 2 RJ45 ports:
[https://simplynuc.co.uk/hades-canyon/](https://simplynuc.co.uk/hades-canyon/)
But it does cost you some serious money. I have a small i3 NUC and would
rather plugin a USB3.0 to ethernet adapter.

~~~
walterbell
There's a dual (Realtek) NIC ASRock Ryzen Embedded for $410, don't know how
well it supports Linux,
[https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16856158065](https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16856158065)

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godzillabrennus
Used proxmox in its earliest iterations within a startup and found it
fantastic.

Recently I tried it again when attempting to install Untangle on a system with
EFI. Untangle didn’t support EFI so I needed to virtualize it.

I found it too difficult to get software network adapters to work with
different physical network cards.

Switched over to VMware ESXi and had vswitch configured within minutes.

YMMV and I’d still recommend Proxmox for simple virtualization projects.

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zigzaggy
Just set up Proxmox on my home lab last week. I’m slowly ramping up the
learning curve. Sounds like I made the right choice.

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tracker1
Would be cool to see an addon for NAS services in Proxmox... I'm setting up a
home server when I get the chance and just want it to run a VM, a handful of
docker containers and provide NAS storage at home. In the end, will probably
add Docker support, run the NAS in a container or vm and leave it at that.

~~~
antsar
Why integrate the NAS?

I run a Synology full of spinning rust for backups, archives, and shared file
storage. It works reliably and is stupid simple to maintain.

Adjacent to that is a server running Proxmox, and I'm currently working to add
Kubernetes/Rancher as a layer on top of that. The Proxmox server has a local
SSD array so the VMs have fast low-latency storage. VMs that touch larger
files (media server, etc) have an NFS mount to the NAS.

IMHO the financial/maintenance overhead of a second unit is totally outweighed
by the easy opportunity to have two performance and reliability tiers (fast
homelab vs reliable slow storage), ability to upgrade/change the two units
independently of each other, and ability for cohabitants to use the NAS
without having to understand/deal with the virtualization stuff.

~~~
tracker1
I have an older Synology NAS, it's really slow, and TBH need more compute for
a few things at home... but don't want to spend on yet another box for this.
The main role of the new server is NAS stuff, but if I can do a few other
things in the background, so much the better.

I'll be running proxmox and VMs off of an nvme drive in a 4x pcie adapter, and
the NAS drives using the hotswap bays in the front.. it's a used R710 (iirc),
and has 6 3.5" bays (came with 2TB drives, but replacing the raid controller
with one that will support larger drives and upgrading to 8TB as time/cost
permits).

I could totally drop the home server compute requirement before the NAS
requirement as my desktop could handle those chores.

~~~
unethical_ban
TBH FreeNAS is a great NAS/SAN solution. I'm running a 4x4 RAIDZ2 (8TB
effective) with a 10 year old quad core AMD and 16GB DDR2 RAM.

If you are okay with the limited VM hosting capabilities of Freenas (headless
VMs and containers on the same network as the file server) then you can use it
for that as well.

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apple4ever
Proxmox is pretty nice, except it has two glaring issues:

Setting up networks is a pain in the butt.

Setting up storage is even worse.

Both really require the command line, which shouldn’t be necessary.

I ran Proxmox in production for a year for a small ecom company, but if I had
to do it again, I’d go vSphere. It’s worth it.

~~~
apple4ever
I just read all the release notes and this reduces the biggest issue with
networking:

> If the package ifupdown2 of the Debian network interface manager is
> installed, it’s now possible to change the network configuration and reload
> it in the Proxmox web interface without a reboot.

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ralala
What is your experience with major proxmox and OS updates?

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mister_hn
We use it at work since Proxmox 3.

The only thing I miss is a truly compatible Terraform module that lets you
create accounts, machines and infrastructure. That would be cool

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harryruhr
What's wrong with using plain libvirt tools, like virsh? Is there some other
advantage to Proxmox besides having a nice WebUI?

~~~
tecleandor
Nobody said it's wrong. It's perfectly OK. Proxmox is _precisely_ a nice web
UI for that and a lot of stuff integrated, such as LXC, CEPH, HA, Live
Migration...

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whalesalad
I cannot stand the Proxmox software. It’s a total pain in the ass to use.

XCP-NG is also a nightmare due to how half baked Xen Orchestra is.

VMWare ESXi is the only type 1 hypervisor that I would ever recommend to a
fellow hacker. You can get a free license for personal use.

~~~
GuyPostington
Can you give an example of the half baked-ness please?

~~~
whalesalad
Have you used it? It’s the perfect example of Twitter bootstrap being all the
rope to hang yourself.

