Why One Engineer Chose Proxmox Over ESXi Without Ever Running VMware in Production
A software engineer building a homelab in 2024 chose Proxmox VE over VMware ESXi from the start, without being driven by Broadcom's controversial pricing changes that pushed many others away. The key reason was Proxmox's unified management of both LXC containers and full virtual machines through a single CLI and web interface, eliminating the need for separate toolchains. Proxmox Backup Server's chunk-level deduplication and cluster-aware scheduling also outperformed the free tier of Veeam, the closest VMware equivalent. Unlike ESXi, which requires a separate vCenter Server VM to enable high-availability clustering, Proxmox achieves the same with simple command-line setup and no additional management layer. The author acknowledges ESXi's advantages in enterprise ecosystem integrations and deep audit logging for compliance-heavy environments, but found Proxmox the stronger fit for a homelab and small-team context.
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