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The sad part is that most companies using VMWare could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares.

WokeUp420 11d ago
Proxmox is good for a home lab but running an enterprise on it is a joke. Good luck with that
- anonreplier 11d ago
  You work for Broadcom don't you fella?
  - WokeUp420 10d ago
    No I work for a 100 year old Fortune 50 with 50,000 VMs.
    - anonreplier 10d ago
      How much has their licensing bill gone up in the last 5 years?
throw0101a 11d ago
> […] could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares. As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago. Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenStack is useful for many large scale environments (especially with tenant isolation and usage tracking/billing/chargebacks). Proxmox is good a good solution for SMBs, but (especially pre-9.x) there were a bunch of things that made it much less usable for large(r) scale deployments IMHO.
- kiney 11d ago
  I was working on a pretty big proxmox setup back in 2016...
  - Avicebron 11d ago
    Well good news, it's improved quite a bit. File level restore is a thing now..
  - throw0101a 11d ago
    > I was working on a pretty big proxmox setup back in 2016... Define "pretty big". Proxmox officially supports up to 32 nodes in a cluster and the Proxmox folks themselves have "seen clusters of around ~24 nodes in production" (as of 2025) and for "bigger clusters than that, fine-tuning might be necessary": * https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-with-48-nodes.174684/#post-812204 https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-with-48-nodes.1746... There are folks talking about running things in the high-40s and low-50s, but that's not officially support. If you have beefy hardware you can fit a lot of VMs on a single hypervisor (I've always found running out of RAM is often the limit). A single vSphere cluster can have up to 96 nodes (without vSAN), and vCentre can handle multiple clusters (2500 total hosts; 40k VMs). Proxmox recently released Cluster Manager, which helps with feature parity. I'm a happy user of Proxmox for a number of years (and helped ran OpenStack before that), but I think for large(r) scale deployments (and even smaller ones) there's a good reason which VMware was so popular. (How many folks are actually at that (large(r)) scale is a different question.) (Also: XCP-ng doesn't seem to get much press. Haven't used it myself though.)
- gerdesj 11d ago
  I started migrating my customers from VMware a good three years ago. It does help that I have thirty years Linux experience compared to the paltry twenty five or so of VMware (which was RedHat plus stuff back in day) I also have rather a lot of Hyper V exposure too and I defy you to love its iSCSI and networking, let alone that awful vTPM thingie. It's Proxmox for me, any day. Even when I've completely knackered it I can always boot a systemrescuecd and mount and chroot the thing back to life.
b3lvedere 11d ago
It's been years i played with Proxmox. Back then it wasn't as easy as Vmware Esxi was/still is: Just boot a pretty small os, define a datastore somewhere, just grow disks, migrate them, etc. All done with some clicks of a mouse button in a nice web gui. Maybe i should start playing with Proxmox again?

WokeUp420 11d ago

Proxmox is good for a home lab but running an enterprise on it is a joke. Good luck with that

anonreplier 11d ago
You work for Broadcom don't you fella?
- WokeUp420 10d ago
  No I work for a 100 year old Fortune 50 with 50,000 VMs.
  - anonreplier 10d ago
    How much has their licensing bill gone up in the last 5 years?

throw0101a 11d ago

> […] could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares. As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago. Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenStack is useful for many large scale environments (especially with tenant isolation and usage tracking/billing/chargebacks). Proxmox is good a good solution for SMBs, but (especially pre-9.x) there were a bunch of things that made it much less usable for large(r) scale deployments IMHO.

kiney 11d ago
I was working on a pretty big proxmox setup back in 2016...
- Avicebron 11d ago
  Well good news, it's improved quite a bit. File level restore is a thing now..
- throw0101a 11d ago
  > I was working on a pretty big proxmox setup back in 2016... Define "pretty big". Proxmox officially supports up to 32 nodes in a cluster and the Proxmox folks themselves have "seen clusters of around ~24 nodes in production" (as of 2025) and for "bigger clusters than that, fine-tuning might be necessary": * https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-with-48-nodes.174684/#post-812204 https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-with-48-nodes.1746... There are folks talking about running things in the high-40s and low-50s, but that's not officially support. If you have beefy hardware you can fit a lot of VMs on a single hypervisor (I've always found running out of RAM is often the limit). A single vSphere cluster can have up to 96 nodes (without vSAN), and vCentre can handle multiple clusters (2500 total hosts; 40k VMs). Proxmox recently released Cluster Manager, which helps with feature parity. I'm a happy user of Proxmox for a number of years (and helped ran OpenStack before that), but I think for large(r) scale deployments (and even smaller ones) there's a good reason which VMware was so popular. (How many folks are actually at that (large(r)) scale is a different question.) (Also: XCP-ng doesn't seem to get much press. Haven't used it myself though.)
gerdesj 11d ago
I started migrating my customers from VMware a good three years ago. It does help that I have thirty years Linux experience compared to the paltry twenty five or so of VMware (which was RedHat plus stuff back in day) I also have rather a lot of Hyper V exposure too and I defy you to love its iSCSI and networking, let alone that awful vTPM thingie. It's Proxmox for me, any day. Even when I've completely knackered it I can always boot a systemrescuecd and mount and chroot the thing back to life.

b3lvedere 11d ago

It's been years i played with Proxmox. Back then it wasn't as easy as Vmware Esxi was/still is: Just boot a pretty small os, define a datastore somewhere, just grow disks, migrate them, etc. All done with some clicks of a mouse button in a nice web gui. Maybe i should start playing with Proxmox again?