Proxmox Virtual Environment: Overview

Introduction

Proxmox Virtual Environment, also known as Proxmox VE, is an open-source software that provides a hyper-converged infrastructure. It’s a hosted hypervisor that can run various operating systems, including Linux and Windows, on x64 hardware. Proxmox VE is a Debian-based Linux distribution with a modified Ubuntu LTS kernel and allows the deployment and management of virtual machines and containers.

Virtualization Technologies

Proxmox VE supports two types of virtualization: container-based with LXC (which replaced OpenVZ used in versions up to 3.4) and full virtualization with KVM. It includes a web-based management interface and even offers a mobile application for controlling PVE environments.

History

The development of Proxmox VE began when Dietmar Maurer and Martin Maurer, two Linux developers, realized that OpenVZ lacked a backup tool and a management GUI. Around the same time, KVM was emerging in Linux and was added to Proxmox VE shortly afterwards. The first public release of Proxmox VE took place in April 2008.

Features

Proxmox VE is an open-source server virtualization platform that manages two virtualization technologies – Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) for virtual machines and LXC for containers – all through a single web-based interface. It also integrates out-of-the-box tools for configuring high availability between servers, software-defined storage, networking, and disaster recovery.

Proxmox VE supports live migration of guest machines between nodes within a single cluster, allowing for seamless migration without interrupting their services. Since PVE 7.3, there has been an experimental feature for migration between unrelated nodes in different clusters. PVE can be integrated with LDAP and Active Directory servers. Since PVE 8.1, a full Software-Defined Network (SDN) stack has been implemented and is compatible with Secure Boot.

Backup and Recovery

The backup of guest machines can be done using the standalone vzdump tool included in Proxmox VE. PVE can also be integrated with a separate machine Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) using the web GUI or with the text-based Proxmox Backup Client application.

Conclusion

Proxmox VE is a complete open-source platform for enterprise virtualization. With the built-in web interface, you can easily manage VMs and containers, software-defined storage and networking, high-availability clustering, and multiple out-of-the-box tools, all with a single solution.