Alternatives to Proxmox VE logo

Alternatives to Proxmox VE

XenServer, OpenStack, KVM, VirtualBox, and VMware vSphere are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Proxmox VE.
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What is Proxmox VE and what are its top alternatives?

It is a complete open-source platform for all-inclusive enterprise virtualization that tightly integrates KVM hypervisor and LXC containers, software-defined storage and networking functionality on a single platform, and easily manages high availability clusters and disaster recovery tools with the built-in web management interface.
Proxmox VE is a tool in the Virtualization Platform category of a tech stack.

Top Alternatives to Proxmox VE

  • XenServer
    XenServer

    It is a leading virtualization management platform optimized for application, desktop and server virtualization infrastructures. It is used in the world's largest clouds and enterprises. ...

  • OpenStack
    OpenStack

    OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface. ...

  • KVM
    KVM

    KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). ...

  • VirtualBox
    VirtualBox

    VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. ...

  • VMware vSphere
    VMware vSphere

    vSphere is the world’s leading server virtualization platform. Run fewer servers and reduce capital and operating costs using VMware vSphere to build a cloud computing infrastructure. ...

  • Qemu
    Qemu

    When used as a machine emulator, it can run OSes and programs made for one machine (e.g. an ARM board) on a different machine (e.g. your own PC). By using dynamic translation, it achieves very good performance. When used as a virtualizer, it achieves near native performance by executing the guest code directly on the host CPU. it supports virtualization when executing under the Xen hypervisor or using the KVM kernel module in Linux. When using KVM, it can virtualize x86, server and embedded PowerPC, 64-bit POWER, S390, 32-bit and 64-bit ARM, and MIPS guests. ...

  • VMware Fusion
    VMware Fusion

    It gives Mac users the power to run Windows on Mac along with hundreds of other operating systems side by side with Mac applications, without rebooting. It is simple enough for home users and powerful enough for IT professionals, developers and businesses. ...

  • Parallels Desktop
    Parallels Desktop

    Parallels Desktop for Mac allows you to seamlessly run both Windows and MacOS applications side-by-side with speed, control and confidence. ...

Proxmox VE alternatives & related posts

XenServer logo

XenServer

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An open source virtualization platform
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PROS OF XENSERVER
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      OpenStack logo

      OpenStack

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      Open source software for building private and public clouds
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      PROS OF OPENSTACK
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        Private cloud
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        Avoid vendor lock-in
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        Flexible in use
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        Industry leader
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        Supported by many companies in top500
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        Robust architecture
      CONS OF OPENSTACK
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        KVM logo

        KVM

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        Kernel-based Virtual Machine is a full virtualization solution for Linux
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        PROS OF KVM
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          No license issues
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          Very fast
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          Flexible network options
        CONS OF KVM
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          VirtualBox logo

          VirtualBox

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          Run nearly any operating system on a single machine and to freely switch between OS instances running simultaneously
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          PROS OF VIRTUALBOX
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            Free
          • 231
            Easy
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            Default for vagrant
          • 110
            Fast
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            Starts quickly
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            Open-source
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            Running in background
          • 41
            Simple, yet comprehensive
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            Default for boot2docker
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            Extensive customization
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            Free to use
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            Mouse integration
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            Easy tool
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            Cross-platform
          CONS OF VIRTUALBOX
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            Simon Reymann
            Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 8.9M views

            Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

            • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
            • Respectively Git as revision control system
            • SourceTree as Git GUI
            • Visual Studio Code as IDE
            • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
            • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
            • SonarQube as quality gate
            • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
            • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
            • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
            • Heroku for deploying in test environments
            • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
            • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
            • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
            • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
            • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

            The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

            • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
            • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
            • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
            • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
            • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
            • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
            See more
            Tymoteusz Paul
            Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 8M views

            Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

            It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

            I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

            We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

            If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

            The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

            Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

            See more
            VMware vSphere logo

            VMware vSphere

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            Free bare-metal hypervisor that virtualizes servers so you can consolidate your applications on less hardware
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            PROS OF VMWARE VSPHERE
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              Strong host isolation
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              Industry leader
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              Great VM management (HA,FT,...)
            • 4
              Easy to use
            • 2
              Feature rich
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              Great Networking
            • 1
              Free
            • 1
              Running in background
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              Can be setup on single physical server
            CONS OF VMWARE VSPHERE
            • 8
              Price

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            Qemu logo

            Qemu

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            A generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer
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            PROS OF QEMU
            • 1
              Performance
            • 1
              Easy to use
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              Free
            CONS OF QEMU
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              VMware Fusion logo

              VMware Fusion

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              Simple Virtual Machines for Mac
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              PROS OF VMWARE FUSION
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                  Parallels Desktop logo

                  Parallels Desktop

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                  Run Windows on Mac
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                  PROS OF PARALLELS DESKTOP
                  • 1
                    Retina support
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                    Works out of the box with zero config
                  CONS OF PARALLELS DESKTOP
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