Proxmox Project
Being a fan of open source software, I opted to try Proxmox for my virtualization needs. There were plenty of obstacles to overcome, from weird firewall traffic to clustering. There is only so much I have done so far, but what I have done has greatly shaped the overall stance of my network and provided me with critical knowledge.
What is Proxmox?
Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) is an open source type 1 hypervisor solution that uses Debian as its base operating system and QEMU as the virtualization agent.
Proxmox Backup Server is an open source backup repository made up of datastores. Proxmox VE has an integration for the backup server within storage, and allows users to create backup jobs and encrypt backups from within Proxmox VE.
Proxmox has paid license features (which is unfortunate, but understandable) but still operates on a non-enterprise repository accessible to all users.
Simply Complicated Setups
Proxmox as a single host has no issues whatsoever from my experience. It works as intended, operates as expected, and does everything you need it to. However, there’s a couple of conditions I found that caused unique issues where I had to manually intervene and attempt to resolve the issues on hand.
For example, I use Proxmox to virtualize my firewall. On a single host, it works great! However, in a cluster, it quickly falls apart. Alongside, I became a huge fan of backups, so backups are even tougher to perform to a cloud object storage. Finally, I set up an off-site dedicated server to handle my off-site backups. Overall, I feel that my data recovery posture sits fine, but that is not a challenge to try and ransomware me.
Check out the links below
Proxmox VE Firewall VM Setup
Proxmox Cluster with Firewall VM