Proxmox Virtual Environment Hardware

Proxmox VE is the leading open-source alternative to VMware vSphere — built on KVM (for VMs) and LXC (for containers), with a clean web UI, built-in HA clustering, ZFS storage, and Ceph integration. We stock servers tuned for Proxmox: Dell PowerEdge R740/R750, HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10/Gen11.

Proxmox has gained significant momentum since Broadcom's VMware acquisition raised licensing costs. Many shops have migrated their 10-50 VM environments from vSphere to Proxmox, keeping their existing Dell/HPE hardware and saving $5-15K/year in licences per cluster.

Standard 3-node Proxmox cluster: dual Xeon Gold 6230 per node, 384 GB RAM, 8× 1.92 TB SSDs in ZFS mirrored striped (zpool create -m mirror). Add Ceph for shared storage if you want true live-migration without shared SAN. Network: dual 25 GbE NICs in LACP.

Migration tooling: Proxmox has built-in importers for VMware ESXi VMs (qemu-img convert from VMDK to qcow2 or raw). We can spec the equivalent Proxmox cluster for any vSphere environment — usually fits in the same chassis with no hardware re-purchase needed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Proxmox a good VMware alternative?

Yes — Proxmox VE matches 80-90% of VMware vSphere's features for free (only paid component is Enterprise support subscription at €110-€450 per CPU per year). Native HA, live migration, snapshots, backups, ZFS/Ceph storage. Most SMB and mid-market workloads run fine on Proxmox.

How much does Proxmox cost?

Free for the software (community edition, GPL-licensed). Paid Enterprise subscription is €110-€450 per CPU per year depending on tier — primarily for enterprise repository access (tested updates) and 24/7 support. Comparable VMware vSphere costs $1.5-5K per CPU per year.

Does Proxmox support live migration?

Yes — live VM migration between cluster nodes works out of the box with shared storage (Ceph, NFS, ZFS-over-iSCSI). Works for both KVM VMs and LXC containers. Sub-second downtime for typical VMs.

Can I run Proxmox on a Dell PowerEdge R740?

Yes — R740 with dual Xeon Gold/Silver, 256-768 GB RAM, and any combination of SAS/SATA/NVMe drives is a great Proxmox host. Proxmox uses standard Linux kernel drivers, so anything Linux supports (which is most enterprise hardware) works.

Other Use-Case Hardware

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VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Proxmox, KVM, Nutanix AHV — hardware sizing, licensing math, deployment.

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