Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, many customers have experienced significant increases in VMware licensing costs.
As a result, organisations are increasingly evaluating alternatives including Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) – a fully open-source platform based on Debian Linux.
For customers who still require commercial support, Proxmox offers optional subscription tiers at a considerably lower cost than VMware. Support subscriptions typically range from €370 per CPU socket per year for basic support up to €1,100 per CPU socket per year for premium enterprise support.
Proxmox is built entirely on open-source technologies including Debian Linux, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), LXC containers, Ceph distributed storage, and the ZFS file system.
This provides a high degree of flexibility, transparency and freedom from vendor lock-in. Organisations can audit, customise and integrate the platform more deeply than is typically possible with proprietary solutions.
Proxmox natively supports both Virtual Machines (VMs) and Linux Containers (LXC).
VMware ESXi focuses primarily on virtual machines. While VMware does support container workloads, it generally requires additional products or platforms such as Kubernetes or Tanzu, which can increase complexity and cost.
Proxmox includes integrated clustering and web-based management tools out of the box. This eliminates the need for a separate management appliance comparable to VMware vCenter in smaller or mid-sized environments, simplifying deployment and reducing infrastructure overhead.
OCF has successfully deployed Proxmox clusters across various enterprise hardware vendors including Lenovo, Dell, and Supermicro, demonstrating strong hardware compatibility and flexibility in infrastructure choices.
VMware continues to provide benefits in certain enterprise scenarios. One example is compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Virtual Datacenters, which allows unlimited guests in virtualised environments on supported hypervisors under a Red Hat subscription. At present, Red Hat does not list Proxmox as a certified hypervisor.
OCF can assist with migration of existing virtual machines from VMware environments to Proxmox, ensuring a smooth transition.