VMware Vsphere (ESXi) or Proxmox VE?

Proxmox is pretty nice so far. From the looks of it using software RAID with it is not a good idea so going to completely get rid of RAID on the server and just use the disks as backup locations. We have a separate NAS so disk performance is not really critical here.

The integrated backups on Proxmox work great, it's exactly what I've been looking for and think it's perfect for our small office environment.
 
As an aside, does Proxmox allow other physical HDDs to be attached or mapped to a VM? The free version of ESXi just doesn't allow any VMs to see the three other HDDs I have in the HP N40L - directpath i/o not supported for the N40L.
 
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Arthur said:
As an aside, does Proxmox allow other physical HDDs to be attached or mapped to a VM? The free version of ESXi just doesn't allow any VMs to see the three other HDDs I have in the HP N40L - directpath i/o not supported for the N40L.
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Hmm haven't tried that and not sure why I would want to either.

I can imagine it wouldn't because not being part of the Proxmox file system it would exclude those drives from the normal backup routines and snapshots and just about every benefit of having a Virtual Server in the first place.

Maybe I'm missing something, but please explain the logic of wanting to do this? What are you running on the N40L that requires this?
 
DrJohnZoidberg said:
Proxmox is pretty nice so far. From the looks of it using software RAID with it is not a good idea so going to completely get rid of RAID on the server and just use the disks as backup locations. We have a separate NAS so disk performance is not really critical here.

The integrated backups on Proxmox work great, it's exactly what I've been looking for and think it's perfect for our small office environment.
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Yeah software raid is a very sketchy affair.

Rather buy a proper hardware raid card or an additional server with the same specification to do the HA Cluster setup.
 
I have 3 x 3TB drives with plentsch data that needs to be accessed by Server 2012 R2 running in a VM, and then served to other workstations. I just can't vmdk all that storage.
 
Giving Proxmox a trial now to see how It compares to our VMWare Vsphere Essentials package.

Any functionality I should look out for that's WOW or beneficial?

Hoping to see a lighter footprint for all our Linux VM's due to OpenVZ.

Any reason why you would go KVM over OpenVZ if you're mainly running Linux guests?

Thanks,
 
jsheed_sa said:
Giving Proxmox a trial now to see how It compares to our VMWare Vsphere Essentials package.

Any functionality I should look out for that's WOW or beneficial?
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The integrated backups are pretty awesome, you can run live backups of the VM's without any downtime or need to use third party software. For me this is a big plus. I am also testing the clustering which also allows you to do live migrations of any VM to another node on the cluster.

Hoping to see a lighter footprint for all our Linux VM's due to OpenVZ.

Any reason why you would go KVM over OpenVZ if you're mainly running Linux guests?

Thanks,
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Cannot see a reason why other than KVM may be more secure, but this depends on how your VM is deployed.
 
DrJohnZoidberg said:
The integrated backups are pretty awesome, you can run live backups of the VM's without any downtime or need to use third party software. For me this is a big plus. I am also testing the clustering which also allows you to do live migrations of any VM to another node on the cluster.



Cannot see a reason why other than KVM may be more secure, but this depends on how your VM is deployed.
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Cool.

I'm having weird AD issues. Auth against AD isn't working despite the SYSLOG showing the correct details. Will play around some more I guess. One thing I found weird coming from VMWare is the ability to download an OpenVZ template and deploy a box immediately.

In VMWare I make my own templates and deploy like that, but I never had the ability to download a pre existing template from a repo.
 
On a side note:

If you use an OpenVZ template (downloaded via the GUI) to deploy your VM then you will not be able to view your VM from the console. It simply won't display.

To fix this:

a) Use an updated template (e.g. You'll most likely have to roll your own as the one via the GUI wasn't set, hence I couldn't browse it. I need the console as the Dev's need to be able to access their VM via console if SSH is broken).

b) Follow the instructions here to fix: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/OpenVZ_Console
 
Finally moved our Windows Server installation over to Proxmox today. Live backups are now insanely simple.

Screenshot%202014-02-13%2016.44.47.png


Now I'm busy setting up OpenVZ containers for our Linux services.
 
jsheed_sa said:
How long do your backups take and how may GB's is each VM?
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Running the first backup now for a Windows VM of around 180GB. Currently I am just backing up to a separate local disk and [-]will probably take just over an hour[/-] took forty minutes.

I will be backing up to a NFS mount on the network also, which will probably take slightly longer.

The OpenVZ backups take a little longer per GB, but it differs from VM to VM as installs with lots of small files seem to take quite long. I backed up a 9GB OpenVZ which took 40 minutes, this is also live backups utilizing LVM2 snapshots.
 
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