Proxmox
Austria's Proxmox VE is open source and free to run; you pay a subscription only for support and the tested enterprise repository. It handles KVM VMs, LXC containers, clustering and Ceph, and Proxmox Backup Server does space-efficient incremental backups.
- Headquarters
- Austria
- Positioning
- EntryMid-market
- Official website
- www.proxmox.com
Who it suits
Organizations with one to five hosts and up to 50 VMs that want off VMware without per-core licensing.
Overview
Who Proxmox is
Proxmox Server Solutions is a privately held company in Vienna, Austria. All of its software is open source under the AGPLv3 licence: you can download it and run it in production without paying. What the company sells is a subscription that gives access to the enterprise repository (tested updates) and to support from Proxmox's own staff.
How the products fit together
- Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) is the hypervisor. It runs KVM virtual machines and LXC containers from one web interface, with clustering, HA, live migration, ZFS and Ceph built in. Version 9.0 shipped in August 2025 on Debian 13, adding snapshots on shared LVM storage (a SAN over iSCSI or FC, for example) and HA affinity rules.
- Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) does incremental, deduplicated backups, can encrypt on the client side and verifies backups on a schedule. Version 4.0 (August 2025) added S3-compatible object storage as a target.
- Proxmox Datacenter Manager reached version 1.0 in December 2025. It gives one view across several clusters and can migrate VMs between them.
- Proxmox Mail Gateway filters spam and viruses in front of your own mail server.
Who it suits
Proxmox suits organizations with one to five hosts and up to about 50 VMs, especially those that want off VMware after Broadcom's licensing changes. The subscription is priced per occupied CPU socket, not per core, in four levels: Community, Basic, Standard and Premium. Every node in a cluster must carry the same level.
The real requirement is people. Whoever looks after it must be able to read Linux logs, understand ZFS or Ceph reasonably well and be comfortable on the command line. If you do not have that person, you need a service provider who does.
Strengths
- No per-core licence. The subscription is per socket, so a two-socket server with 64 cores costs the same as any other two-socket server.
- VMs, containers, clustering, HA, ZFS, Ceph and a firewall all come in one package with no paid add-ons.
- Proxmox Backup Server deduplicates well: daily backups of VMs that change little add only a small amount of space, and you can restore a single file from inside a VM.
- There is a built-in wizard to import VMs from ESXi, and Veeam now supports Proxmox, so leaving VMware does not mean starting from zero.
Things to know before choosing
- Proxmox's own support works European business hours, five to six hours behind Laos. If a host fails on a Vientiane morning, you rely on your own team or a local provider first.
- It runs without a subscription, but then updates come from the no-subscription repository, which gets less testing. For production systems, buy at least the Community level.
- Ceph needs at least three nodes, a dedicated storage network of 10 Gbps or more, and enterprise-grade SSDs. Skimp on any of these and performance drops and recovery gets hard.
- Some software, such as core banking or telephony appliances, is only supported on VMware or Hyper-V. Check each vendor's support statement before you migrate.
Using it in Laos
For offices, schools and factories in Laos with two or three servers, the layout we use most is: two Proxmox VE nodes replicating ZFS to each other every 15 minutes, a small QDevice as the third vote for quorum, and a Proxmox Backup Server in another room or building.
What we commonly see on sites:
- Brownouts and outages: ZFS copes better than ordinary RAID, but you still need a UPS that shuts hosts down over the network (NUT supports APC and Eaton). Try our UPS runtime calculator.
- Hardware: use enterprise SSDs with power-loss protection, not desktop SSDs, because ZFS and Ceph write heavily.
- People: Linux engineers exist in Vientiane, but few have run Ceph in production. Write a recovery runbook and rehearse it twice a year.
Subscriptions can be bought from Proxmox directly or through a reseller and activate immediately, with nothing to ship.
Compared with alternatives
If you run hundreds of VMs or software that is only supported on vSphere, VMware remains the safer choice despite the higher cost. Nutanix fits when you want HCI with round-the-clock vendor support on validated hardware. For backup, many organizations use Proxmox Backup Server for VMs and Veeam for Microsoft 365 and physical servers.
Product lines
- Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE)
- Proxmox Backup Server
- Proxmox Mail Gateway
Solutions that use this brand
Server VirtualizationCollapse a room of ageing servers into one cluster on VMware, Proxmox, Nutanix or Hyper-V, so one dead host no longer stops the…
Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)Compute, storage and virtualization in the same nodes; add a node when you need more. Built for 1–3 person IT teams with no SAN…
Backup & Disaster Recovery3-2-1 backups with an immutable copy ransomware cannot delete, and restores that are actually tested, not just green job reports.
Email SecurityStop phishing, fake boss and fake supplier emails (BEC) and malicious attachments with filtering, SPF/DKIM/DMARC and sandboxing.FAQ
Is Proxmox really free? What is the catch?
The software is genuinely free and fine for production. What you do not get without paying is the enterprise repository, where updates are tested first, and vendor support. The web interface shows a no-subscription notice, but every feature still works.
How many servers does a cluster need?
HA needs three votes for quorum. Two servers plus a small QDevice (a mini PC or a VM elsewhere) with ZFS replication works. Ceph needs at least three real servers, and four is better for maintenance.
Can we back up Proxmox with Veeam?
Yes. Veeam has a plug-in for Proxmox VE that does VM-level backups, and current versions support Proxmox VE 9. It suits organizations already on Veeam that want all backups in one console. If you are starting fresh, Proxmox Backup Server is enough and costs less.
Which server brand should we use with Proxmox?
Standard servers from Dell, HPE or Lenovo work well. What matters more than the brand: an HBA, or a controller set to HBA mode, for ZFS (no hardware RAID underneath), enterprise SSDs, and network cards with good Linux drivers such as Intel or Mellanox.
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