Linux Answered

I’ve been using Proxmox for almost two month’s now, so I thought it’s time to write a small review it. I’ve preferred Proxmox above ESXI for one simple reason, the web interface makes it manageable from a Linux computer. A friend of mine told me that Proxmox was very stable and user friendly. At the moment of writing Esxi only has an application that runs under Windows. Whenever I would need to change something to my virtual servers, I would need to restart to Windows. Or I could use the command line. However, my skills aren’t strong enough to use the CLI of Esxi.

Before I continue my story, everything that I say here is pure personal opinion. It might not always be true, but it feels like this to me. Feel free to comment on everything I say or to share your own experience with either of these products.

One of the first things that I noticed was, how mature Proxmox is and yet, so unknown. I’ve spoken to many people and not many of them really knew what Proxmox was. Most of my friends use other tools. They prefer Esxi when it comes to business purposes, or KVM/Virtualbox on none production servers.

So, more about Proxmox, they offer 2 ways of virtualisation. KVM and OpenVZ. For those who are a familiar with Linux, KVM is full virtualisation where OpenVZ uses the same kernel as the base machine. OpenVZ are really containers. Where KVM is really separated from the base system, OpenVZ isn’t. For example, it is possible to open the files from an OpenVZ vm from the base machine. This isn’t possible with KVM. The KVM servers also have their own kernel.

That said, some of you might already see the one “big” problem that OpenVZ has, you can only virtualize Linux machines. OpenVZ cannot virtualize Windows. So if you want to virtualize Windows, you have to use KVM. Which works very good as well.

I’m currently running most of my Linux machines with OpenVZ. As a matter of fact, only my windows virtual machines run in KVM. I’ve used KVM before and I’m very happy about it. My experience with openVZ was a lot smaller, OpenVZ seems like a nice technology, as long as you don’t want to change anything to the kernel.

The Proxmox interface works very intuitive and good. It was very easy to find everything that I needed. Withing half an hour I already had a couple of servers up and running. In the beginning I made the mistake to only use the Debian template that was delivered by default. Make sure that you take a look at the openvz website to get the templates you want.

After half a day I noticed, shame on me, that this was an i686 architecture. I removed all my virtual machines, downloaded some new templates from the official openVZ website. As you can see on the website, they support many different Linux distributions. The community helps as well. They provide other templates that aren’t officially supported.

One other thing that really worked very nice is the network. Right now I own my own IPv4 ripe range. Using OpenVZ I had no problems at all to configure it. Using KVM I had a few more problems, however, this has nothing to do with Proxmox/KVM/OpenVZ, but with the network setup that kimsufi/ovh is using.

 

The only thing which will not work right now is the backup tool. I’m still looking into this if this is me doing something wrong, or it just doesn’t work. For now I solved it to take my backups manually. Actually, cron is doing it for me. So it’s not really manually.

 

Cron died on my base machine and I didn’t notie!

When it comes to the openVZ, I had a few problems with ntpd etc. and the locales. But once you figure out how to work with these things, or how to fix them OpenVZ seems the way to go as long as you want to virtualize a Linux System.

That’s pretty much about it. I know it’s not a big review, I just want to show people that Proxmox is being used by others, and that it runs successfully serving what ever you need.

Conclusion, I found a new love. I really like Proxmox, it’s fast and stable. It still has some minor issues and less functionality then Esxi currently has. However, due the fact that it is open source, you can edit or create scripts. With Esxi this is a little bit more complex, but it should be doable.

For me, Proxmox is the absolute winner when it comes to private stuff. When it comes to production, I still stand by Esxi. They have more tools and have more experience. However, Proxmox and KVM are worthy competitors, especially when price counts.

Cheers!