We all love virtual machines and containers (well, sometimes we love containers) but what do you do when you don’t want to pay Microsoft, or VMWare, or Citrix, thousands of dollars yearly? What do you do if you don’t have a student license for any of that tech, and you really want to implement open source technologies? You turn to the Linux solution, of course, and use KVM/QEMU!
The problem is, plain ole’ KVM and QEMU are a lot to manage on their own. There’s a lot of moving parts and trying to keep a grasp on everything without a single pane of glass is dreadfully time consuming. The big name proprietary-wares also have another advantage in that they have responsive web applications and mobiles apps, accessible APIs, storage management, built-in backup and snapshot solutions, and VDI capabilities. It’s not that the commands or points to remember for KVM/QEMU to do these things are excessively difficult, it’s just that, I imagined spending more of my time using my infrastructure rather than building it from the ground up. Enter Proxmox VE.
Proxmox VE implements a wide array of open source technologies and provides an easy to manage interface that does all of these things you’d expect a big name proprietary hypervisor to do, while simultaneously staying true to the free and open source ideology of, “It’s yours, and you can do with it as you please.” Their community repository receives semi-regular updates and their documentation is top notch. Proxmox documentation is community contributable and in the past I have written contributions to add to their knowledge base. Their admin guide is probably one of the best organized documents I have ever seen, and their wiki is phenomenal.
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