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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

I love Proxmox as a virtual server manager - I can't imagine running anything else as a base for a homelab. Free, powerful, VMs or CTs operating quickly, graphical shell for administration, well documented and used, ZFS is a first class citizen.

I've kind of wanted to build a three node cluster with some low end stuff to expand my knowledge of it. Now they have a datacenter controller. I'd need to build twice the nodes.

Question: Does anyone know large businesses that utilize proxmox for datacenter operations?

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Yes! In this great video from level1techs Wendel walks around in a brand new ai gpu datacenter, an engineer tells what they use for all the normal stuff :-)

Inside the Modern Data Center! SuperClusters at Applied Digital https://youtu.be/zcwqTkbaZ0o?si=V2uPScjyN_sJcIh7&t=696

The company I work for is migrating a few hundred VMWare hosts to Proxmox due to licensing and cost considerations. In our case, since most of the hosts are not clustered, the migration process is quite straightforward. The built-in migration tool proves to be exceptionally effective.

Both my current org and previous org (large) have mentioned it many times as an option, but both ended up choosing other commercial alternatives: HyperV and XenServer.

I think the missing datacenter manager was causing a lot of hesitation for those that don't manage via automation

I run roughly 30 PVE hosts across several customers (all ex-VMware). Few more to migrate.

You can migrate a three node cluster from VMware to PVE using the same hardware if you have a proper n+1 cluster.

iSCSI SANs don't (yet) do snapshots on PVE. I did take a three node Dell + flash SAN and an additional temporary box with rather a lot of RAM and disc (ZFS) and took the SSDs out of the SAN and whistled up a Ceph cluster on the hosts.

Another customer, I simply migrated their elderly VMware based cluster (a bit of a mess with an Equallogic) to a smart new set of HPEs with flash on board - Ceph cluster. That was about two years ago. I patched it today, as it turns out. Zero downtime.

PVE's high availability will auto evacuate a box when you put it into maintenance mode, so you get something akin to VMware's DRS out of the box, for free.

PDM is rather handy for the likes of me that have loads of disparate systems down the end of VPNs. You do have to take security rather seriously and it has things like MFA built in out of the box, as does PVE itself.

PVE and PDM support ACME too and have done for years. VMware ... doesn't.

I could go on somewhat about what I think of "Enterprise" with a capital E software. I won't but I was a VMware fanboi for over 20 years. I put up with it now. I also look after quite a bit of Hyper-V (I was clearly a very bad boy in a former life).

> iSCSI SANs don't (yet) do snapshots on PVE.

There seems to be a mechanism for that since version 9.0 (August 2025), does that not do what you need?

We run proxmox on a bunch of hardware servers, but for "homelab" we use Ubuntu on ZFS + Incus cluster. What I look at is IncusOS: a radically new approach to base cluster OS: no SSH, no configuration. So far it looks too radical, but eventually I see that as the only way to go for somebody who has a "zoo" of servers behind Tailscale: just base OS which upgrades safely, immutable and encrypted, without any unique configuration. The vision looks beautiful.

> I've kind of wanted to build a three node cluster with some low end stuff to expand my knowledge of it. Now they have a datacenter controller.

You can set up a cluster to play with multiple nodes without the just-announced PDM 1.0. Or you can use PDM to manage three stand alone nodes.

If you want to do both, perhaps a 3-node cluster plus a 1-node stand alone with a PDM 'overlay'. So just a +1 versus a 2x.

> I'd need to build twice the nodes.

Why twice the nodes? The manager is optional -- but do you need multiples?

Also, when I looked into clusters (that I haven't implemented,) I did see qdevices. It's a way to have a cheap and weak third node just to break ties.

I set it up for my small company 5 years ago. Couldn't be happier with it honestly.

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