Proxmox vs ESXi/vSphere: What is your experience?

For me the biggest impact is the cost of licensing in the case of VMware despite its overall intuitiveness and ease of handling and management. However, KVM-based Open Source solutions are becoming easier to manage as well, a prime example is Proxmox, which has been gradually growing, and has always provided free resources that are quite expensive on VMware. I really think that anyone who has never started this subject should start with Proxmox to avoid gaining more expensive habits: D
A big hug and happy holidays.

This is with reference to your email if you technically compared, Proxmox is new in the market and it is easy to manage but as far as support concerned I would suggest buying standard Proxmox support if it is a new installation. As you are aware, VMware is too costly in terms of license.

To summarize, Proxmox is easy to manage and better. Kindly find some Authorized Proxmox partner in your country and get initial support.

In my experience, Proxmox is a very good product, comparable with VMware. We can argue about VMware being fancy and popular these days but PM does the job for a fraction of the cost. Just get some reasonable hardware to get started and see for yourself.

If you have strong knowledge of Linux, Proxmox is the best solution, but you should have a strong Linux expertise. You can also add some georedundancy solution like LINBIT, it depends on what you need. How many servers do you want to migrate? are you looking for an HA solution or just VM solution

There is nothing that Proxmox cant manage in my actual infrastructure more than 1 PB storage, and more than 10 sites in active active cluster solution, if you want support we offer support for your deployments, English and Spanish native speakers

OK, I must start with my limitations: I live and work in Brazil, a third-world country. So a tight budget is a daily reality.

Proceeding: I am a Proxmox user since version 1.6.

And finally, the last time I implemented anything VMWare was in 2015. So I can not say much about recent versions.

About Proxmox: much of the limitations described by these comments no longer exist ( like a snapshot on the block shared storage, for example ) and every new version removes some limitations (I'm following this for a long time ).

At this moment, I have 7 private clouds implemented in Proxmox (from 5 to 12 nodes), with shared storage as well with dedicated storage, 2 of these systems - with both.

It is rock solid, and, till now, I never had a scenario in which Proxmox can not provide a solution.

So, I will repeat what I said to another question similar to this: Try it!

You don't need to pay anything. Just download and install. If it does not provide what you need, then look somewhere else.

To close it, I reinforce what @Luis Apodaca ​has said.

There are only a few functions or goals you can not achieve with Proxmox. And those are really difficult scenarios to deploy or to be involved in. In 99% of cases, Proxmox gonna do the job.

Put simply: Proxmox does not support thin provisioning and snapshot on the block shared storage. 

Block shared storage is the most used storage in these days (I think a classic San storage with its luns presented to a cluster of hypervisors via iscsi or fc). These are the most limiting features that Proxmox lacks. 

I have a little experience with PM and I really liked it. 

It is a real contender in server virtualization and is supports lots of storage configuration options including ZFS.

In my experience, Proxmox lacks some features that for me are essential to an enterprise virtualization solution. You need to have Linux experience to be able to configure multipath for SAN storage devices, and to be able to use storage snapshots.

Also, the Proxmox installer was not able to detect storage LUNS to install the OS to be able to boot from SAN.

If you can afford VMWare licenses, I would choose VMware because in my experience it is a mature virtualization solution that will simplify administration and has features like vvols that you don't get in proxmox. Also it can be integrated with other platforms for monitoring and orchestration like Cisco Intersight, as well as backup solutions like Veeam.

Proxmox is not a bad solution, but right now it lacks the maturity for me to consider it as an enterprise virtualization solution.

In my 32-year IT career, I haven't heard about Proxmox 6. 

I have G8 experience. So I told you I have 15 years of experience In ESXi/vSphere. It is very friendly when working right.

We are using VMware from the last 10+ years and do now have exposure on Promox VE.

We have downloaded it to evaluate and compare.

ive been testing proxmox its very similar to vsphere server layout only difference i see is the pricing one is free and the vmware cost

I don't have experience with Proxmox but since it uses KVM and brings with great improvements, I propose you to use the comparison between VMware vSphere and KVM. And the KVM advantages are that you add those powered by the whole Proxmox features portfolio.

I really can’t really comment on Proxmox as I have not worked with it before but I can share on VMware ESXI 6.7.

We have been using VMware Esxi for 7 years I can say this has been the best hypervisor for us since we use VMware and Veeam for all our replication, backups and VMotion for migrating our servers from one host to the other in realtime without affecting any currently running operations.

We find our operations being smooth and more efficient on VMware ESXi 6.7 hypervisor and I can say it’s a very stable platform for us and I would highly recommend it in any organization. The most benefits that come with VMware ESXI 6.7 is that it supports all 2019 OS versions like Windows server 2019 which was not supported in the previous version. We also noticed an increase in vCenter access and performance which was a plus for us when using VMware ESXI 6.7 compared to the previous 6.5 version.