Moving a Midsize Business to Proxmox: The Good, the Rough Edges, and the Savings

For a lot of midsize IT teams, the last year has felt less like "strategic planning" and more like damage control. VMware renewals came in wildly higher than expected. Licensing rules changed midstream. In some cases, legal letters showed up for products that people thought were already paid for. That was the moment when "we'll deal with this later" turned into "we need an exit plan." That's where Proxmox enters the picture. This isn't a fairytale migration story where everything was effortless and magical. It's a very real account of what happens when a midsize business—around 500 employees, five hosts, roughly 100 VMs—decides to leave VMware behind and run Proxmox in production. Six months in, the results are mostly positive, occasionally frustrating, and financially hard to ignore. ## Why Proxmox even made the shortlist Once VMware pricing went sideways, alternatives had to be taken seriously. Hyper-V was quickly ruled out. Official support from Microsoft is basically a shrug, and the licensing story feels like a maze designed by someone who hates sysadmins. On top of that, past experience with Hyper-V left a bad taste: instability, weird bugs, and tooling that always felt one patch away from breaking something important. Nutanix looked tempting at first. Slick marketing, strong enterprise positioning. Then people started sharing renewal numbers. Horror stories popped up. Suddenly it didn't feel like escaping VMware so much as replacing it with a different kind of hostage situation. Other KVM-based platforms exist, but most are either niche, poorly documented, or simply not common enough to inspire confidence. Proxmox stood out because it's well-known, battle-tested, and built on technologies that already run massive chunks of the internet. That familiarity mattered. KVM, QEMU, Ceph—this isn't experimental tech. It's the same foundation used by major cloud providers. Proxmox just wraps it in a UI and management layer that makes it usable for normal humans. ## The decision that made management comfortable One of the biggest hurdles wasn't technical. It was organizational. Management didn't want to hear "open source" and imagine a bunch of critical systems duct-taped together with forum posts. The compromise was support. Not just a subscription, but 24/7 coverage and consulting services through a Proxmox partner. That changed the conversation. Suddenly this wasn't a risky DIY project. It was a supported platform with someone to call when things went sideways. Proxmox itself doesn't offer direct 24/7 support, which is still one of its biggest weaknesses, but the partner ecosystem filled that gap well enough to get sign-off. ## Migration: less drama than expected The actual move was surprisingly uneventful. New hardware was purchased. The internal team handled the migration, with a consultant brought in mainly to sanity-check designs and configurations. There were no catastrophic outages. No "we have to roll everything back" moments. Over six months in production, the platform has been stable. That's not to say it was flawless. Some applications didn't love seeing new hardware IDs and decided to reset their licenses. That's annoying, but also common with any hypervisor migration. A few vendors wouldn't officially bless Proxmox, even though they happily support KVM or Nutanix, which are effectively the same thing under the hood. Crucially, nothing outright failed to run. Every workload came across. Some needed a little massaging. None had to be abandoned. ## It's not VMware, and it doesn't pretend to be This is where expectations matter. Proxmox is not as polished as VMware. The UI is functional, not luxurious. Some workflows feel rough around the edges. There are fewer guardrails. If you're used to a platform that gently guides you away from dangerous decisions, Proxmox will happily let you make them. That's both a strength and a weakness. If your IT team is strong—people who understand networking, storage, Linux, and clustering—Proxmox feels empowering. You can see what's actually happening. You're not fighting opaque abstractions. When something breaks, you can go under the hood and fix it. If your IT team relies heavily on the platform to protect them from themselves, this is where things get risky. Proxmox doesn't hold your hand. It expects competence. Several commenters summed it up well: Proxmox is a great fit for SMBs with real sysadmin talent. If you don't have that, you may want something more managed, even if it costs more. ## The Ceph question (and why it matters) Storage is where a lot of the deeper conversations happen. In this setup, Ceph was chosen because it integrates cleanly with Proxmox. That choice sparked plenty of debate in the comments. Some folks argued for SANs. Others said SANs are legacy and should be phased out entirely. The reality is messy. VMware environments often rely on FC or iSCSI SANs, and Proxmox's integration there isn't as smooth or as confidence-inspiring. iSCSI works, but it feels newer. Fibre Channel support exists, but it's not exactly friendly. Ceph, on the other hand, feels like where Proxmox really shines. It's powerful, scalable, and deeply integrated. It's also complex. Many people point out that Proxmox itself isn't the hard part—Ceph is. Once you understand Ceph, the rest of the platform makes more sense. This is another area where experience matters. Ceph rewards teams that are willing to learn how distributed storage actually behaves instead of treating it like a magic box. ## High availability and the "two-node trap" One recurring theme in the discussion was cluster size and quorum. People coming from VMware often assume two nodes plus shared storage equals HA. Proxmox plays by different rules. For real HA, Proxmox wants three nodes. Not because it's being stubborn, but because quorum matters. With two nodes, a network hiccup can leave both hosts thinking they're alone, and suddenly everything goes read-only. You can work around this with quorum devices, but now you're stacking exceptions on top of exceptions. With three nodes, things behave predictably. Lose one node and the cluster keeps going. That predictability is why Proxmox recommends odd-numbered clusters. It's not academic. It's operational. For businesses, following supported and documented designs matters. When something breaks at 3 a.m., you don't want to explain that you went off the reservation because it felt "good enough." ## Backups: PBS vs Veeam Proxmox Backup Server is a nice bonus. It's fast, efficient, and tightly integrated. For some shops, it's good enough to replace a commercial backup product entirely. Others aren't ready to give up Veeam, especially when immutable offsite storage and complex recovery workflows are already in place. In this case, Veeam stayed, paired with S3-compatible immutable storage. That choice wasn't about distrust in PBS; it was about risk tolerance and familiarity. The nice part is having options. Proxmox doesn't lock you into one backup story. ## Testing failure, on purpose One of the most reassuring moments came from doing the thing everyone fears: pulling plugs. Host failures were simulated. Network links were yanked. Ceph did what it was supposed to do. VMs failed over as expected. Redundant networking configured at the Proxmox level held up. There are edge cases, sure. Some nuanced failure detection in VMware is more refined. But nothing encountered so far has been a deal-breaker. The takeaway wasn't that Proxmox is perfect. It was that it's predictable. When you understand how it's designed to behave, it behaves that way. ## The money part (because it matters) Over a full hardware lifecycle, the cost came out to roughly 25 percent of what VMware and Dell quoted. That's not a rounding error. That's budget-changing money. It's not just licensing. It's flexibility. You're not locked into a specific vendor's hardware or roadmap. You're not forced into subscription gymnastics. You can spend more on hardware, support, or people—things that actually improve reliability. Several commenters pointed out that Proxmox's pricing model also makes growth less scary. Scaling out doesn't come with a surprise bill that needs executive approval. ## Where Proxmox still falls short The wishlist is pretty consistent. Direct 24/7 support from Proxmox itself would be huge. Relying on partners works, but it's not the same as calling the vendor. Validated hardware designs would help SMBs who don't want to become hardware architects. Imagine a few certified Supermicro builds you could just order, rack, and deploy. Tighter SAN integration would make migrations easier for VMware-heavy shops that aren't ready to jump to Ceph. None of these are deal-breakers. They're friction points. And they're exactly the kind of things that could push Proxmox from "great alternative" to "default choice." ## The bottom line Six months in, the verdict is simple: the move was worth it. Proxmox isn't VMware. It's not trying to be. It trades polish for transparency, and hand-holding for control. For midsize businesses with capable IT teams, that trade feels increasingly attractive. The advice from the original post still stands: do it—but get training or consulting if you're nervous. Respect the platform. Follow the docs. Design for how Proxmox actually works, not how VMware trained you to think. If you don't have strong IT talent, look elsewhere. If you do, Proxmox feels like a rare thing in enterprise IT right now: a platform that does what it says, costs what it should, and doesn't treat its customers like a revenue extraction problem waiting to happen.