My VMware to Proxmox experience

For almost the entirety of my professional IT career, it was quite obvious that VMware vSphere was the platform to be on. Sure Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V are very respectable platforms and I have no negative thoughts about them. But vSphere was always the best option at the time with the best features. I think VMware was always the choice because of the following reasons:

• Ease of management.
• Free license for a single host.
• Stable platform.
• widely used.

Even at home in my home labs, I have always used VMware ether a single ESXi server, workstation or fusion. But recently I have seen the the popularity of Proxmox growing and growing. At first I was put off by Proxmox. Mainly as I didn’t know that it was free to use. I remember the first time I installed it (in VMware workstation), I was put off by the angry ‘subscription required’ message at login.

Over the last fews months, I have learned more and more about Proxmox, so I decided to give it a go. At first, I installed it on my secondary server. I have a HP Proliant DL320 G5. Yes its old and a little underpowered, but I did’nt want to commit until I understood the new platform enough. Since installing, I was very happy with the fact that it supported software RAID of the boot drive out of the box. I have always had the hardware RAID disabled on this server as I have never had to use it. So I mirrored the two 500GB drives together using the Proxmox installer. The install did take a little long, but I think that might be my hardware rather than the software.

Over the next few days. I played with spinning up linux containers and VMs and I found that the performance was quite good. At this point I decided to take the plunge. I took my existing server running VMware ESXi 5.5 and I formatted it and installed Proxmox.

I installed the OS onto the existing 32GB USB drive that used to have ESXi installed. I then used the built in software RAID to put the 4x 500GB drives into a RAID 10. After the install, I then decided to spin up a few Windows VMs and I can honestly say. I was so surprised with how amazingly better the performance was. I installed my good old friend Windows Server 2003 R2 and it installed in under 5 minutes. This was so surprising and honestly I was impressed.

Once I had a few VMs running, I then decided to try to cluster together my two machines. This is where I got my first problems. I used my main server as the cluster controller and then added the HP server to the cluster and it failed to join. I lost connection to the HP and I had to SSH into it to reboot it. The web interface was not working and I had a big fat angry X through the HP in the main server’s console. At this point, I went and did some research. I came across this article online. I used it to reset the clustering on both machines. Rebooting I could then start again to cluster the machines. Same result. Reset again and it worked this time!

I then tried to play around with migrating VMs and quickly found that it is quite hard without shared storage. Without shared storage you have to migrate the disk image first and them migrate the server to another host. There is nothing wrong with this, but its an extra step. But I am very happy I can do this without vCenter. I always disliked that I had to allocate 4-10GB of memory just to vCenter with VMware. But with Proxmox there is no appliance to run to manage your cluster of hosts. This appealed to me massively.

So then I wanted to try shared storage. I used a SMB share as shared storage and then was able to migrate VMs live. I was again very impressed.

Conclusion

So overall. I am happy I made this change as below I summarise the benefits of being on Proxmox over VMware.

Pros	Cons
– Better hardware compatibility. – Administer easy from any platform with no admin tools to install. – Better performance. – Quicker boot times of both hosts and VMs. – Software RAID support. – More file-systems for shared storage (not just iSCSi or NFS) – Fewer resources consumed by OS or appliance.	– Not as easy to administer. – Too much reliability on the console. – Strange error messages that prevent a task from being completed. – The longer installation process.

After all of this, I think I am happy to stick with Proxmox as the better performance is certainly a bonus.

My Setup

WATERBOX (Main Server)	HYDRA (HP DL320 G5e)
– Intel Core i7 4770 (4 core, 8 threads) (Watercooled) – 22GB DDR3 Non-ECC memory – 4x WD Enterprise 500GB SATA drives – GeForce GTX750 SC (Watercooled) – 32GB USB Drive – Quad Intel network card (PCI-E)	– Intel Xeon CPU 3075 @ 2.66GHz (Dual-core) – 8GB DDR2 Non-ECC Memory – 2x WD Enterprise 500GB SATA drives.

Proxmox, Software, Tech

October 4, 2020