Proxmox Virtual Environment 9.1 available
37 comments
·November 19, 2025throw0101c
zamadatix
Nutanix is popular with traditional larger enterprise VMware type customers, Proxmox is popular with the smaller or homelabber refugees. Exceptions exist to each of course.
luma
Talking to midmarket and enterprise customers and nobody is taking Proxmox seriously quite yet, I think due to concerns around support availability and long term viability. Hyper-V and Azure Local come up a lot in these conversations if you run a lot of Windows (Healthcare in the US is nearly entirely Windows based). Have some folks kicking tires on OpenShift, which is a HEAVY lift and not much less expensive than modern Broadcom licenses.
My personal dark horse favorite right now is HPE VM Essentials. HPE has a terrible track record of being awesome at enterprise software, but their support org is solid and the solution checks a heck of a lot of boxes, including broad support for non-HPE servers, storage, and networking. Solution is priced to move and I expect HPE smells blood in these waters, they're clearly dumping a lot of development resources into the product in this past year.
nezirus
I've used them professionally during 0.9 times (2008.) and it was already quite useful and very stable (all advertised features worked). 17 years looks pretty good to me, Proxmox will not go away (neither product or company)
proxysna
Two days ago saw a shop that moved to Incus. Seems to be a viable alternative too.
baq
um broadcom is publicly traded as $AVGO...?
stackskipton
Plenty of people describe Broadcom as "Publicly traded Private Equity"
SteveNuts
The only thing missing making Proxmox difficult in traditional environment is a replacement for VMware's VMFS (cluster aware VM file system).
Lots and lots of organizations already have SAN/storage fabric networks presenting block storage over the network which was heavily used for VMware environments.
You could use NFS if your arrays support it, but MPIO block storage via iscsi is ubiquitous in my experience.
whalesalad
The Proxmox answer to this is Ceph - https://ceph.io/en/
jmward01
Watching hypervisors slowly improve over the last few years has been amazing. They aren't quite to the point that I will install them under any new hardware I buy and then put my daily driver OS on top, but they are very close. I think a strong focus on creating 'the OS under your OS' experience seamless could open up a lot more here.
zer00eyz
I'm not sure I would want my daily driver to be a hypervisor... Whats controlling audio, do I really need audio kernel extensions on my hypervisor? Whos in charge when I shut the lid on my laptop...
But the moment you stop trying to do everything locally Proxmox, as it is today, is a dream.
It's easy enough to spin up a VM, throw a clients docker/podman + other insanity onto it and have a running dev instance in minutes. It's easy enough to work remotely in your favorite IDE/dev env. DO I need to "try something wild", clone it... build a new one... back it up and restore if it doesn't work...
Do I need to emulate production at a more fine grained level than what docker can provide: easy enough to build something that looks like production on my proxmox box.
And when I'm done with all that work... my daily driver laptop and desktop remain free of cruft and clutter.
luma
VMware has been so good and reasonably priced for so long that there hasn't been a competitive market in the enterprise virtualization space for the past two decades. In a way, I think Broadcom's moves here might be healthy for the enterprise datacenter longer term, it has created the opportunity for others to step in and broadened the ecosystem significantly.
rtaylorgarlock
For many folk's workflows, I'd wager that hypervisors are there and ready. I had a nice time setting up xcp-ng before deciding microk8s fits my needs more betterer; they're just plum good, well documented, and blazing fast.
hendersoon
So with support for OCI container images, does this mean I can run docker images as LXCs natively in proxmox? I guess it's an entirely manual process, no mature orchestration like portainer or even docker-compose, no easy upgrades, manually setting up bind mounts, etc. It would be a nice first step.
Lapalux
Been waiting to update from v8. Time might be right now
gigel82
What is this "application containers" BS, just add native docker stack support. Most folks in the self hosting community already deploy nested dockers in LXCs, just add native support so we can cut out the middle man and squeeze out that indirection.
veidr
Nah. Incus.
Sorry, but I bought Proxmox 7, but it is not comparable. Incus does everything (and more) with better interface, WAY better reliability, and also not like a hundred EUR or whatever. (100 EUR is fine with me if better, but not if not better...)
abotsis
I’ve been looking at incus, and some aspects are appealing (creating a vm/container via cli). But I think proxmox having better clustering, and built in support for ceph, backups (with proxmox backup server)… proxmox just had a little more maturity behind it. I’ll be watching incus though.
wantlotsofcurry
I was looking to setup Proxmox for my homelab soon but this comment got me interested in Incus. Mostly because I've never heard of any Proxmox alternatives before this. You can try out Incus in your browser here: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/try-it/
The demo does take ~10m to get into a working instance.
hrimfaxi
Their site might be getting hugged, even the non-demo page is taking ages to load.
ekropotin
Dang it! I’ve just got comfortable with Proxmox, but now I have to start looking into Incus because of your comment.
brandon272
I tried demo'ing Incus from their "Try it online" page but it just spins endlessly and nothing happens.
PentiumBug
Interesting. Does Incus has support for storing virtual machine assets in a NFS store so they could be easily migrated?
unethical_ban
Proxmox is free, too.
Incus looks nice, though it looks to be more API driven , at least from the landing page. I can't attest to Proxmox in a production/cluster environment but (barring GPU passthrough) it's very accessible for homelab and small network.
Semaphor
GPU passthrough works fine? I use that for transcoding in Jellyfin.
proxysna
Takes 10 minutes to setup and one reboot. Works flawlessly, Linux or Windows. vGPU is a different story though.
unethical_ban
I don't remember if I tried and failed, or if it seemed too much for me... I have an Arc A series; if you have a verified guide I would like to take a look!
whalesalad
Proxmox is entirely free and very, very reliable. Personal preference is fine, but I really don't think any of your claims are true.
lysace
15-20 years ago this wouldn't have been a company. It would have been a strong but informal open collaboration where smart and just people funded by various entities around the world kept it running.
Then the opportunity to get rich by offering an open source product combined with closed source extras+support was invented. I don't like this new world.
Edit: Somewhere along the line, we also lost the concept of having a sysadmin/developer person working at like a municipality contributring like 20% of their time towards maintenance of such projects. Invaluable when keeping things running.
Volundr
Funny enough, Proxmox VE is 17 years old. I want to say it was ballpark 13-14 years ago I was using it to replace ESXi to get features (HA/Live migration) that only came with expensive licensing. 15-20 years ago there were definitely companies doing exactly this.
npteljes
What do you find wrong with "this new world"? For context, I'm using their free offering for my home server, for 6-7 years now. Happy as a clam.
lysace
It enables Oracle-like behavior. Once you're locked in as commercial user they can do whatever they want.
Remember: Not all commercial users are FAANG rich. Counties/local municipalities count as commercial users, as an example.
Proxmox (and XCP-ng?) seems to be "the" (?) popular alternative to VMware after Broadcom's private equity-fuel cash grab.
(Perhaps if you're a Microsoft shop you're looking at Hyper-V?)