A Journey From ESXi to Proxmox In Three Acts
Part 1 - Truth And Consequences
Hows and Whys
A bit about me to start. I'm a network engineer with a past life in server/network administration. Cisco, Arista, Aruba, Microsoft, and VMware certified. I'm a bit of a recent convert to Linux fanboy, but still learning. I'm big into virtualization at the home, it scratches my itch. A close friend says if there's a more difficult way to do something, I'll find it. He's not wrong, but it's fun.
First Nerd Problems
I recently had a quandary. I've been running my home VMs on ESXi for a while now. My faithful old desktop was chugging away, 24/7, for years.
A 10(!) year old MSI motherboard, 32GB of RAM, several PCI add-on cards for more NICs. It was starting to concern me, as I was maxed out on RAM and sooner or later I was going to need to upgrade the memory which would have required a completely new build to get beyond 32GB. And the box wasn't getting any younger.
My VMs consisted of a Plex server on Windows OS, Veeam Running on yet another Windows OS, several Pi-Hole installs, my Untangle firewall, and Home Assistant for home automation, as well as some other experimental VMs .
I used Veeam Community to backup my VMs to an ISCSI target, but I found that application to be a bloated, temperamental, slow resource hog.
And when it comes to using consumer hardware, sometimes ESXi can be a crapshoot for hardware compatibility. And I found ESXi on it's face to be super limited and relying on Veeam to maintain some sort of disaster recovery to restore backups to my offline backup host to be super kludgy. The "instant restore" feature is the main reason I used it. Even then, it was ehhhh....
So what to do? What functionality was I ultimately looking for?
Requirements
Find a Type1 Hypervisor that is light, fast.
Easy to to use.
Run on damn near anything, and bring down some of my power consumption. The desktop ran at about 85-120 watts under stabilized load.
Vcenter-like usability.
Backup capabilities built in.
Low cost, or better yet free.
While I'm wishing for the impossible let's throw in a leprechaun butler too.
Thoughts and Ponderings
I first looked at XCP-NG and while it initially was very attractive, backups were not in the free tier. It was out of the running very quickly.
So I decided to revisit Proxmox. I had looked at Proxmox about three years prior, but it didn't quite meet every need I was looking for. It was a little difficult to use, and at that time the super linux-ey nature deterred me. Also Proxmox itself is not a hypervisor, but more a frontend for KVM/LXC.
So I spun up a few servers in PNET/EVE to run a POC. (If you run PNET or EVE on baremetal you can use nested virtualization. Super useful for labbing out hypervisors.)
And pretty soon, it blew my socks off. Let's check off my requirements.
Find a Type1 Hypervisor (KVM/LXC) that is light and fast - CHECK
Easy to to use - Partial CHECK, but full CHECK once I got over my Linux learning curve. (explained later)
No detectable hardware limitations - CHECK. It runs on damn near anything.
Vcenter-like usability - HUGE CHECK. Out of the box, without a bloated, cumbersome VM to manage it all, you get LACP, live migration capabilities, clustering, etc.
Backup capabilities built in - CHECK. Proxmox supports backups, it's built in. There's another aspect to backups that's amazing, I'll touch on it in the future.
CHECK. Proxmox is FREE, all features unrestricted. You do not get access to the "Enterprise Repository" without a support contract, but for the home virtualization enthusiast, this isn't a deal breaker as there is a vibrant and useful community.
Not in my requirements list, but container support ended up being a huge CHECK.
Leprechaun Butler - /sadface. But 7 out of 8 isn't bad. ;)
So there it is. Proxmox was the way to go. My next section will be on my POC and some of the goals/difficulties I experienced in that process.