My boss mentioned a few months ago that we use Proxmox in the office. I knew of it, it’s basically a VMware ESXi or Hyper-V alternative,but I’d never actually dug into it.
I had an old machine laying around doing nothing. So I figured: let me see if I can turn this thing on without breaking it.
Guys. If you haven’t played with Proxmox, you need to start.
I’m not going to walk you through the install. I watched NetworkChuck and a few other creators who’ve already done that better than I would. But I will tell you this: I should have done this six months ago. Hell, I probably should have done it three years ago.
It’s VMware ESXi for free. At your house. And for those of you paying attention, it’s free at your office, too.
We actually run it in the corporate office now. We’ve been swapping out VMware. To be fair, we brought in an expert who understands Proxmox at a deeper level than I do. I don’t know that I would have started the migration myself as a VP or CIO. I’m only a few days in. But yeah, it’s real. I can see why you’d use it. I can see why you could reduce your VMware licensing costs to zero.
Do I understand everything? Not yet. My install is maybe 48 to 72 hours old. I still have no idea what I’m doing. But it works. I’ve got three or four VMs spun up. I can clone a VM in a couple of clicks. There’s something about templates that seems really cool. I haven’t fully understood what that means yet. I connected it to a NAS and apparently I get shared storage across multiple nodes when I set up a cluster. There’s something about odd numbers of nodes being better for quorum, still working through that.
But this thing has legs.
I now understand why my CIO is going this direction. The licensing costs on VMware, ESXi, vCenter, Hyper-V,they’re insane right now. You get what you pay for, sure. But when “free” does 90% of what the paid product does? That changes the math.
My CIO, I trust implicitly on this. I’m not there yet personally, but only because I’ve been at it for three days. Give me a couple of weeks.
Better showing up late to the party than never showing up at all. I’m at the party. I’m playing catch-up. And so far, it’s a really good day.
Talk to you guys soon.