A virtualization platform should carry your workloads—not make your budget walk the plank.
VMware’s current subscription and core-based licensing can make the price hard to justify, especially when you need a dependable hypervisor but don’t need the full VMware bundle. For many new deployments, the cost alone makes Proxmox the obvious place to start.
Proxmox VE brings virtual machines, Linux containers, clustering, high availability, live migration, and backups together in an open-source platform. The features aren’t divided into expensive tiers. If you want enterprise repositories and vendor support, subscriptions are available.
And don’t mistake open source for small scale. Proxmox can run large clustered environments. The trick, as with any serious platform, is to chart the route properly: design the storage, network, backups, and recovery around the workloads.
At TechPotato, we’d put Proxmox at the helm for most new virtualization projects. VMware still has a place when a business depends on its integrations or has a strong reason to stay with an existing vSphere environment. Otherwise, Proxmox offers a capable, scalable platform without asking your budget to walk the plank.
Before changing course, test your applications, hardware compatibility, and backup and restore process. Then compare the real cost of each platform you’d actually deploy and support.