Proxmox VE

Proxmox VE sits between the metal and everything else on this page. It takes a server you own and turns it into a pool of virtual machines and containers, with backups, snapshots and live migration included instead of sold separately.

Why we still choose it

Virtualisation is where licensing costs start to shape the architecture. The commercial hypervisors charge by socket, by core or by virtual machine, and the price changes at renewal, which is how a technical decision made in 2019 becomes a procurement emergency in 2026. Proxmox is AGPL, so the software does not expire and the bill does not grow with your success.

Underneath, it is a Debian system with KVM and LXC, and that matters more than it sounds. The host is an ordinary Linux machine you already know how to run, with standard packages, networking and logs. When something breaks at three in the morning, you are debugging Linux, not an appliance.

Clustering comes included. Three nodes give you live migration between hosts, high availability for the guests that need it, and Ceph if you want distributed storage as well. pvecm and qm can do from the shell everything the web interface does, so the platform can be scripted and the runbook can be a file instead of a series of screenshots.

Where it sits in our stack

Proxmox is usually the first thing installed and the last thing touched. NixOS guests run on top of it, which divides the work neatly: Proxmox looks after the hardware, the storage and the backup schedule, and each guest is still described entirely in one file. The firewall stays with pf at the border, and WireGuard carries the management network, so the web interface is never on a public address.

We recommend running Proxmox Backup Server alongside it. It gives incremental, deduplicated, verifiable backups with a retention policy an auditor can read, and we test the restores, since a backup nobody has restored cannot be relied on.

When it is the wrong answer

If you need one small always-on service, running it directly on a single machine is simpler, and we will tell you so. If your workload is elastic, spiking unpredictably by an order of magnitude, a hyperscaler’s billing model may suit it better, and we would rather say that than sell you a cluster that sits idle.

Not wanting to own hardware is also a legitimate position. The middle road we most often recommend is Proxmox on rented dedicated servers from European providers: your own hypervisor, no per-socket licence, and no data centre of your own to staff.