I use it with Cursor and create vm templates and clone them with a proxmox MCP server I've been adding features to and it's been incredibly satisfying to just prompt "create template from vm 552 and clone a full VM with it".
And we naturally try to contribute to every project we use however possible, be it in the form of patches, QA, detailed bug reports, ... and especially for QEMU et al. we're pretty content with our impact, at least compared to resources of other companies leveraging it, I think.
If all it'd take is being "just" a simple UI wrapper, it would make lots of things way easier for us :-)
This would be appealing in a world where Kubernetes doesn't exist as a mature option.
Don't the vast majority of Proxmox users use it for small VM labs, without all the bells and whistles?
In my little world this largely was true until Broadcom bought VMware and proceeded to blow it up.
I know of a handful of rather “large” (100s of physical servers at least) VMware based products that are as quickly as possible migrating to proxmox.
Given how universal this is for my little slice of IT, I imagine this is quite pervasive for the “mid tier” VMware organization.
The feature set of Kubernetes and Proxmox VE do not really overlap completely IMO, or would need much more hands-on approach and specialized in-house staff to set up and maintain, why go for that if you can do everything one need with much less headache.
As the former needs much more dedicated management and maintenance resources and is often pulling in more complexity than most need, but there one needs also to differentiate from those developing and releasing their own applications and being fine with what e.g. kubernetes offers, quite possibly even wanting that, compared to those e.g. providing infrastructure for internal use or just favoring more monolithic applications, often boils down to taste and what one is comfortable with. Our enterprise customers are very diverse, from small shops with two or three node clusters to host the office infra to five digit hosts and 6 digits VMs spread out. We even know a few setups using Proxmox VE as basis for their Kubernetes cluster.
Finally, PVE is quite a bit older than Kubernetes, we still exist and see a lot of adoption (already before the Broadcom deal, albeit there was an uptick since then), so even without some technical comparison of features or use cases or the like it seems clear that Kubernetes isn't an alternative for all, just like Proxmox VE certainly isn't one.
> Don't the vast majority of Proxmox users use it for small VM labs, without all the bells and whistles?
One should not confuse being very popular in the home lab scene due to being very approachable, simple to set up, and most importantly 100% FLOSS, not just open core or the like, with it being the main or target audience, but we're really happy with the synergies it provides.
And actually I'd not frame it as bad thing that Proxmox VE is used that way, we do not want to be a club that is hard to access, neither cost wise nor hindering scaling smaller VM labs to bigger setups, and certainly not from a complexity barrier.
Let's not pretend that Proxmox or any of these are silver bullets that kill the (inherent) complexity demon. Anything touching SDN or clustered storage, in any ecosystem, will need dedicated in-house experts that know networking, storage, Linux and how Proxmox (or Kubernetes) approaches those domains.
Unless you are just using Proxmox for small VM labs, in which case it ought to be compared with libvirt and standalone QEMU.
> Anything touching SDN or clustered storage, in any ecosystem, will need dedicated in-house experts that know networking, storage, Linux and how Proxmox (or Kubernetes) approaches those domains.
There are widely different level of expertise needed though, and the setups that often are managed by admins with not in-depth expertise in clustering or SDN can still get things done with Proxmox VE, and if they are out of idea we got our enterprise support and naturally also the very active and friendly community forum to help.
> Unless you are just using Proxmox for small VM labs, in which case it ought to be compared with libvirt and standalone QEMU.
Yeah, I really do not get that point, you basically invalidate 95% of Proxmox VE's feature set because it might not be fully leveraged by a specific user group and because there are some different solutions that also allow one to do similar things. That would also invalidate Kubernetes, it's not completely unpopular in small labs either after all.
To be honest, to me, it feels a bit to me like a justification attempt for the initial post in this chain here that brushed off Proxmox VE as just some small UI/UX wrapper around QEMU/KVM and all the Real Work™ being done by others, possibly because you never actually used it, but I might read it the wrong way, and I'm certainly not offended in any way, just find it a bit odd.
And FWIW, I tried several times to point out that QEMU itself is only a small part of what we provide–even if not, just providing a good API abstraction around that is significant work, especially if it should allow two decades (and counting!) of stable upgrade paths and _without_ libvirt. And we nowhere hide the underlying technologies, we're proudly building upon–and trying to give back–to all projects we use, be it Debian, QEMU/KVM, LXC (which we co-maintain), Linux kernel, FRR, rust, or–like here–Perl...
But as you're rather dismissive and now even start to call people trolling I hardly see any need to take your writings as serious discussion, they do not seem to be done in good faith, and IMO doing it this way certainly won't help to promote FLOSS, that should be possible without being dismissive to others work.
Would have been cool of you to just say "oh neat, I didn't realize that you did all that too".
There could be tons! Or not many. It's completely irrelevant to my comment.
The funny thing is with Cursor I can just generate a new capability, like the clone and template actions were created after asking Sonnet 4.
For context, here's that classic thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 :)
I like having a local server I can carry with me and control using just Cursor to manage it.
So basically the freedom that comes with a homelab without using proxmox UI and ssh.
I found Turnkey Linux pretty nice. They provide ready to use Linux images for different services. Proxmox integrates with them, so for example to install Nextcloud, all I needed to do is to click around a bunch on the Proxmox interface, and I'm good to go. They have around 80-90 images to choose from.
I guess I do also sometimes use it for ephemeral things without having to worry about cleaning up after too. E.g. I can dork around with some project I saw on GitHub for an afternoon then hit "revert to snapshot" without having to worry about what that means for the permanent stuff running at the same time.