I think the limited hardware support of ESXi is a strength in some ways. Anything that is actually supported will have extremely stable and high quality drivers. That said, I'm doing a Proxmox build later today ;-)
Hm sad to see you having these problems on Proxmox. I have a Ryzen 1600 and can confirm some of the problems, too. For disk performance what helps is allocating an io thread for it, enabling SSD emulation, discard and adding it on a virtio bus. Using LVM thick as the backend store would be the fastest(but no snapshots). Also CPU speed can be increased by setting the cpu governor to performance (which frankly should be the default for a VM platform). Lastly RAM speed can be tweaked by enabling hugepages. Don't use ballooning memory, it has a big performance impact! Unlike many resources suggest they can be setup in a way that dynamically allocates them.
As someone who manages both in the enterprise, there's no real comparison, vSphere (ESXi) runs circles around Proxmox. I watched this video and was thinking .. seriously?
I mean, in what respect does it run circles around PXMX? More power to you for what works for you of course, But I've got statistics going back to november 2022 for my game servers. Longest outage is 20 minutes (likely power-outage or maintenance) and total 90 day downtime of an hour, which includes scheduled restarts. Basically perfect uptime. Easy configuration, easy clustering, ZFS. Seems to me that ESXi has been baking in it's own juices too long and the community finally caught up. But that's because it works for me and my needs, homelab needs. Considering this video was aimed at those users who likely wouldn't want to pay thousands for those features in ESXi, not to mention their proprietary design language, I stand by px.
I have two questions, sorry in advance if i misunderstood oder didnt get something. English is not my main language, i only understood around 90%. Since you didnt metion hyper-v or unraid i guess you consider them as "shitty" hypervisiors? May i ask why? I know the title says "free user ... homelab" but what if someone had the audacity to use some of the leaked keys on github to enable all enterprise features for esxi. With all the featues enabled would you consider esxi over proxmox?
I suppose Hyper-V can work just fine, however I don't consider it a good out of box experience, you need to mess around with Project Honolulu to make it comparable to what Proxmox gives you oob. As for unlocking enterprise features with pirate keys, sure; go right ahead. But freeware ESXi is a pain to update, and if you circumvent that with an illegitimate licence, one day the easy street might vanish. Again, I'll also double down on ESXi having less hardware support in most cases than PVE as well. I have recently rebuild my homelab around an E5-2697 and all my issues with PVE disappeared, now I'm running it 24/7 with nothing but love, but whatever you want to test around with is valid, just not necessarily what I'd recommend. Get deployed, don't waste time developing a method to getting deployed; imo.
Oh, and I don't like unraid or Zen based hypervisors either. Zen's web interface gives me nightmares and isn't feature complete (depending on flavor of course, but none I have tried are good.) Unraid seems ok but is really meant to run off USB. Which is fine if you don't mind a stick hanging in your desktop 24/7 or have a real blade server with a dedicated internal USB-A, but for most people; I assume they'll want to install their hypervisor like a traditional OS.
All in all, the video wasn't meant to be a comprehensive guide to all free or paid type-1s on the market, just a comparison to the two platforms I personally have the most experience running. To cap it off, if you think you can do it better with something else, I love that for you; and you should! Get deployed!
@@spottedtango Thanks for the detailed answers! I guess you are right i should probably just get going. I got a very good deal on an old dl380 gen8 with two E5-2650 and 64GB of ram. Over a week it is sitting here now, waiting for me to choose its hypervisor... Unraid is paid, Free ESXi sucks according to you (and i mean pirating who does that anyways.. xD) I probably go with proxmox, i like that its opensource and it seems to have a large community for support.
I think the limited hardware support of ESXi is a strength in some ways. Anything that is actually supported will have extremely stable and high quality drivers. That said, I'm doing a Proxmox build later today ;-)
Hm sad to see you having these problems on Proxmox. I have a Ryzen 1600 and can confirm some of the problems, too. For disk performance what helps is allocating an io thread for it, enabling SSD emulation, discard and adding it on a virtio bus. Using LVM thick as the backend store would be the fastest(but no snapshots). Also CPU speed can be increased by setting the cpu governor to performance (which frankly should be the default for a VM platform). Lastly RAM speed can be tweaked by enabling hugepages. Don't use ballooning memory, it has a big performance impact! Unlike many resources suggest they can be setup in a way that dynamically allocates them.
New VCenter looks awesome.....
As someone who manages both in the enterprise, there's no real comparison, vSphere (ESXi) runs circles around Proxmox. I watched this video and was thinking .. seriously?
I mean, in what respect does it run circles around PXMX? More power to you for what works for you of course, But I've got statistics going back to november 2022 for my game servers. Longest outage is 20 minutes (likely power-outage or maintenance) and total 90 day downtime of an hour, which includes scheduled restarts. Basically perfect uptime. Easy configuration, easy clustering, ZFS. Seems to me that ESXi has been baking in it's own juices too long and the community finally caught up. But that's because it works for me and my needs, homelab needs. Considering this video was aimed at those users who likely wouldn't want to pay thousands for those features in ESXi, not to mention their proprietary design language, I stand by px.
I have two questions, sorry in advance if i misunderstood oder didnt get something. English is not my main language, i only understood around 90%.
Since you didnt metion hyper-v or unraid i guess you consider them as "shitty" hypervisiors? May i ask why?
I know the title says "free user ... homelab" but what if someone had the audacity to use some of the leaked keys on github to enable all enterprise features for esxi. With all the featues enabled would you consider esxi over proxmox?
I suppose Hyper-V can work just fine, however I don't consider it a good out of box experience, you need to mess around with Project Honolulu to make it comparable to what Proxmox gives you oob. As for unlocking enterprise features with pirate keys, sure; go right ahead. But freeware ESXi is a pain to update, and if you circumvent that with an illegitimate licence, one day the easy street might vanish. Again, I'll also double down on ESXi having less hardware support in most cases than PVE as well. I have recently rebuild my homelab around an E5-2697 and all my issues with PVE disappeared, now I'm running it 24/7 with nothing but love, but whatever you want to test around with is valid, just not necessarily what I'd recommend. Get deployed, don't waste time developing a method to getting deployed; imo.
Oh, and I don't like unraid or Zen based hypervisors either. Zen's web interface gives me nightmares and isn't feature complete (depending on flavor of course, but none I have tried are good.) Unraid seems ok but is really meant to run off USB. Which is fine if you don't mind a stick hanging in your desktop 24/7 or have a real blade server with a dedicated internal USB-A, but for most people; I assume they'll want to install their hypervisor like a traditional OS.
All in all, the video wasn't meant to be a comprehensive guide to all free or paid type-1s on the market, just a comparison to the two platforms I personally have the most experience running. To cap it off, if you think you can do it better with something else, I love that for you; and you should! Get deployed!
@@spottedtango Thanks for the detailed answers! I guess you are right i should probably just get going. I got a very good deal on an old dl380 gen8 with two E5-2650 and 64GB of ram. Over a week it is sitting here now, waiting for me to choose its hypervisor...
Unraid is paid, Free ESXi sucks according to you (and i mean pirating who does that anyways.. xD)
I probably go with proxmox, i like that its opensource and it seems to have a large community for support.
*i already integrated it into my network and configured the ILO aswell as the disk arrays tho