What is Proxmox? A comprehensive guide to its features and benefits

Proxmox VE is an open-source virtualization platform that combines KVM and LXC technologies for managing VMs and containers through a unified web interface. It offers clustering, high availability, and flexible storage at no cost, while Acronis Cyber Protect complements it with advanced, agentless backups, cloud recovery, and complete data protection for hybrid environments.

Virtualization is a core component of modern IT infrastructure, playing a central role in streamlining server management and optimizing resources. Virtualizing servers offers several benefits to enterprise software, including improved digital security and faster software deployment cycles for applications and services. However, the key advantage for IT admins and system engineers is the potential for significant cost savings generated by decoupling software services from standalone physical hardware.

Given the ubiquitous adoption of virtualization, the market offers a variety of options, each claiming to optimize different aspects of virtualization. If cost-efficiency is your primary concern, you’ve likely realized that most commercial virtualization solutions are all costly! This probably shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. After all, these products deliver significant value but often include proprietary features and enterprise support that go beyond what can be easily built or maintained in-house by internal IT teams.

Fortunately, for organizations seeking a more cost-effective alternative, Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) is a fully open-source virtualization platform that can serve both the enterprise and small-to-medium-sized business markets. 

In this post, we’ll dive into the key features Proxmox VE provides, highlight how it addresses common IT challenges, and discuss potential limitations to be aware of before adopting it for your organization’s virtualization needs. 

Proxmox VE is an open source virtualization platform first released in 2008. It supports two forms of virtualization: Kernel-based virtualization and operating-system-level virtualization via Linux Containers (LXC).

One key consideration when adopting any open source solution is the licensing model. Specific open source licenses have provisions about whether or not you can use the software in an enterprise environment. Others might require that you yourself adopt the license in question for code that interacts with the software.

Proxmox VE uses the Affero General Public License (AGPL). Before choosing Proxmox for your business, verify that this license aligns with your legal and compliance requirements. Consult with legal advisors to ensure that the AGPL will work for your company and your jurisdiction.

In addition to virtualization capabilities, Proxmox VE streamlines management through a single web-based interface. As a result, engineers only have to learn a single user interface, regardless of whether they’re managing virtual machines or containers.

In terms of functionality, Proxmox VE is most commonly compared to VMware, and VMware vSphere in particular. While an in-depth comparison of these two solutions is beyond the scope of this article, Proxmox offers similar features to vSphere. Depending on your organization’s unique needs, whether it’s advanced features or scalability, either Proxmox or VMware could be the better fit.

There’s a lot to like about Proxmox VE. In this section, we’ll run through some key features that set Proxmox apart from competitors within the virtualization market.

You can’t start the feature list without talking about the most important one: the price.

As an open source solution, you can download and start using Proxmox VE for free, right now, with no strings attached. It’s licensed under the AGPL, which is an extremely permissive license. While you should always check licensing terms with your legal department before committing to them, the AGPL provides considerable flexibility. If you’re looking to access the Proxmox Enterprise repositories, get access to the timeliest feature and security updates, get technical support from developers, and access to all updates and security fixes, you’ll need an enterprise subscription.

Proxmox does sell training and support services if you need a little help. In other words, you don’t have to learn the software entirely on your own. But if you’re thin on budget or uncomfortable with VMware moving toward a subscription-based platform, you can’t beat Proxmox’s price.

Proxmox VE supports two different kinds of virtualization: Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and Linux Containers (LXC). Let’s break down what makes these approaches unique and how you can benefit from each.

KVM virtualization is what we’d call “full virtualization.” It runs in a Linux kernel on any CPU that supports native virtualization. KVM supports Windows and Linux operating systems natively, including on the same physical hardware. Each virtual machine runs entirely independently of the others on its own fully virtualized hardware stack; no resources are shared directly with other VMs running on the same host.

LXC is a type of operating-system-level virtualization designed specifically for Linux. LXC containers share underlying hardware while running in isolated user-space environments. This makes the virtual environments easier to stand up and tear down, but doesn’t provide the same level of isolation or segmentation.

Proxmox VE offers several management UI options. We’ve already mentioned the fully featured web UI, which works for both KVM and LXC, offering an easy point-and-click management interface for your virtual servers.

But the web UI isn’t the only management option. Proxmox VE also provides both a Linux and Windows command-line interface, which allows you to write scripts to manage your servers. Each Proxmox server also provides a REST JSON API to allow for centralized server management.

Finally, Proxmox leverages that REST API to power its mobile management capabilities. This includes an official Android app for on-the-go access, as well as full support for modern mobile browsers via HTML5.

Clustering is an architecture that combines multiple physical computer resources into one virtual computer resource to pool CPU power, application memory, and data storage. Proxmox supports clustering large numbers of virtualized machines across a broad base of physical machines by utilizing the Proxmox Cluster File System. This enables you to sync configuration files across all the nodes in your cluster automatically.

Additionally, Proxmox supports what they call “Live/Online” migration, which allows you to migrate nodes between clusters. In contrast, both the node and the server are online and operational, with no service interruption to end users. This is a powerful feature that provides a lot of flexibility in large clusters.

Proxmox provides an automated node manager that offers fault tolerance by springing into action any time it detects a node is failing. What’s more, High Availability works well with some lightweight configuration. Just get a cluster configured and add your node, and you’re good to go.

In addition to the native HA functionality included out of the box, Proxmox also provides an “HA Simulator” that lets you test out the behavior of a Proxmox cluster with three nodes and six VMs, enabling you to test things like node behavior and failover processes without putting production systems at risk. It’s a valuable tool that helps you understand how Proxmox handles real-world scenarios before deploying it into a live environment.

Proxmox integrates with every major authentication platform, including Linux PAM, LDAP, ActiveDirectory and OpenID Connect. Regardless of the way you authenticate users within your network, Proxmox is ready out of the box to connect with your team.

Additionally, Proxmox supports role-based authorization for resource access. You can define roles within your organization and then assign granular permissions to resources of all types to ensure that authorized users can do the things they need to do, and that they can’t access resources they don’t need for their jobs.

Those are the key features of Proxmox VE. Next, we’ll cover the issue of networking and storage.

When it comes to storage and networking, Proxmox provides a slew of options. One of the challenges of adopting a virtualization-heavy architecture is managing the complexity of both how data is transferred between nodes and how it gets stored when it arrives at the correct node. 

Proxmox VE provides two major flavors of networking: the simple, more limited option and the complex, powerful one. 

The simple option comes via the Linux Networking Stack. This is an operating-system-level networking option that creates the software equivalent of a physical network switch for each node on a physical host, connecting directly to the physical networking card on the host. 

The more complicated option is a software-defined network (SDN), which gives you the flexibility needed to adopt a full multi-tenant approach to your nodes, allowing each node on a host to belong to an isolated private network. With an SDN, nodes can reside on physically separated hosts while appearing to be on the same local network, allowing them to communicate seamlessly.

Due to the complexity and advanced capabilities of Proxmox’s SDN implementation, check out the Proxmox Wiki if you want to learn more.

Much like networking, Proxmox also provides flexible storage options. You can store disk images locally on the host hardware or on a remote, network-connected storage system like NFS or SAN. Both approaches are fully supported by Proxmox, making it easy to integrate Proxmox into your existing storage architecture.

Proxmox also natively integrates with Ceph, a distributed storage system designed for scalability. Ceph enables you to distribute storage across hundreds or thousands of nodes across multiple logical networks. 

Proxmox and Ceph allow you to set up separate storage pools with different performance and redundancy characteristics. For example, you might store mission-critical application data on a high-redundancy pool while storing server debugging logs on a more cost-effective pool. With Ceph, each workload is routed to the appropriate storage pool automatically.

Now, let’s discuss something critical to all businesses: staying up and running in the face of adversity.

Proxmox offers built-in disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) options via its high-availability and clustering configurations. You can configure a Proxmox cluster to span multiple physical locations, e.g., in multiple data centers, allowing for geographic redundancy. The high-availability features continuously monitor node health; in the event it detects that a node is failing, Proxmox springs into action to spin up another instance in the specified location. 

This setup enables you to define a location as a failover site, ensuring continuity even in the event of a full data center outage. Whether you’re dealing with a power outage or a network disruption, Proxmox can maintain service availability by shifting workloads to predefined backup locations.

It’s important to understand that this HA capability is exclusively a measure for ensuring uptime on your services. It doesn’t protect against data loss within the nodes that experience an outage. So, while this functionality is helpful in ensuring business continuity, it might not support full-scale disaster recovery as well as you might hope.

Proxmox VE is a powerful, enterprise-grade virtualization platform that meets the needs of demanding IT environments. However, it doesn’t cover every single base, and that’s where software like Acronis Cyber Protect steps in to fill the gaps, offering advanced backup functionality that complements Proxmox. 

  One of the biggest advantages of Acronis is its agentless backup for Proxmox VE, which delivers VM-level protection without deploying agents inside every virtual machine.  Acronis is a little different and enables you to perform full and incremental backups without deploying agents on every VM, which simplifies your infrastructure. While high availability is still a Proxmox-native feature, Acronis covers everything simply and in a single screen.

Acronis enables fast, full-VM recovery and granular file-level restore, all managed through a simple unified interface. Whether you’re restoring an entire virtual machine or just a single file, the process is streamlined through the same dashboard. Not only does this improve recovery time objectives (RTOs), but it also reduces administrative headaches.  Additionally, Acronis unlocks the ability to push backups to a higher number of storage destinations, verifies backups after they have been made, performs anti-malware scanning on backups, and offers cloud-based disaster recovery.

If you have a hybrid environment, Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud extends this functionality beyond on-premises infrastructure, providing cloud-native backup capabilities through the same interface. This enables you to manage backups for both on-prem Proxmox nodes and cloud-based applications like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, all in one place. This eliminates the need for separate tools or siloed systems, giving you a clearer view of your data protection landscape.

It’s important to note that Acronis provides powerful VM-level backup and recovery, but it doesn’t replace Proxmox VE’s native high-availability features. Cluster-level HA is still entirely managed through Proxmox.

If you’re evaluating virtualization platforms for your business, Proxmox VE deserves serious consideration. It’s exactly the kind of reliable, proven open source software that businesses around the world have come to trust for their daily operations. 

Proxmox offers impressive flexibility, supporting KVM and LXC virtualization, robust SDN, and a range of local and shared storage options. Out of the box, it includes high-availability, flexible backup mechanisms, support for authentication providers and an intuitive web-based management interface accessible across devices. 

With all of this functionality, Proxmox VE is well-suited to a vast range of infrastructure needs, from labs and SMBs to enterprise-grade deployments. That said, it doesn’t cover every single base for every single enterprise, like unified backup or cloud-based data protection.  

Fortunately, there’s good news: Acronis Cyber Protect was built to complement Proxmox, providing advanced, agentless VM backups, fast recovery options, and a centralized management interface that supports both on-prem and cloud workloads. 

If you’re considering Proxmox for your environment — or you already use it and are interested in learning how Acronis can help you level up — please contact us today. Our experts are ready to help you take your Proxmox environment to the next level.

Proxmox VE is an open-source virtualization platform that lets you run and manage virtual machines (KVM) and Linux containers (LXC) through a single web interface. It’s designed for both SMBs and enterprises seeking a cost-effective alternative to commercial hypervisors like VMware.

Yes. Proxmox VE is free under the Affero General Public License (AGPL). You can deploy and manage it without cost, though a paid subscription gives you access to enterprise repositories, security updates, and official technical support.

Proxmox offers similar core virtualization features—VM management, clustering, and high availability—but at a fraction of the cost. However, VMware provides deeper enterprise integrations and support services. Proxmox is ideal for organizations seeking flexibility without licensing fees.

Proxmox includes high availability and snapshot-based backups for uptime protection, but it lacks advanced backup automation and off-site recovery features. Pairing it with a solution like Acronis Cyber Protect adds full-VM and file-level backups, anti-malware scanning, and cloud disaster recovery options.

Acronis complements Proxmox by delivering centralized, agentless VM backups and rapid recovery across on-prem and cloud environments. Together, they cover both infrastructure uptime (via Proxmox HA) and complete data protection (via Acronis backup and DR tools).