Proxmox

Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) is a complete, open-source server management platform for enterprise virtualisation. It tightly integrates the KVM hypervisor and Linux Containers (LXC), software-defined storage, and networking functionality on a single platform. With over one million hosts deployed worldwide and an active community of more than 150,000 members, Proxmox is one of the most widely adopted open-source virtualisation solutions available.

The latest major release, Proxmox VE 9.0, is built on Debian 13 "Trixie" with Linux kernel 6.14, QEMU 10.0, Ceph Squid 19.2, and ZFS 2.3. Key new features include SDN Fabrics for simplified spine-leaf network architectures with OpenFabric and OSPF routing, snapshots for thick-provisioned LVM shared storage (ideal for FC/iSCSI SAN environments), and HA resource affinity rules for fine-grained workload placement.

The VMware Import Wizard, introduced in PVE 8.2, enables organisations to migrate VMware ESXi and vCenter VMs directly into Proxmox VE through the web UI—a critical capability as businesses move away from proprietary hypervisors. Proxmox Datacenter Manager provides a unified overview across multiple clusters and nodes from a single pane of glass, while Proxmox Backup Server delivers enterprise-grade incremental, deduplicated backups with ransomware protection.

With no per-socket or per-VM licensing, Proxmox dramatically reduces virtualisation TCO while delivering features that rival VMware and Hyper-V. Subscriptions start from just EUR 115 per CPU socket per year for enterprise repository access and support.