OS family Unix-like | Working state Current | |
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Developer Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH Source model Free and open source software Initial release 15 April 2008; 8 years ago (2008-04-15) Latest release 4.4
/ December 13, 2016; 3 months ago (2016-12-13) | ||
Proxmox Virtual Environment, or Proxmox VE, is an open-source server virtualization environment. It is a Debian-based Linux distribution with a modified RHEL kernel and allows deployment and management of virtual machines and containers. Proxmox VE includes a Web console and command-line tools, and provides a REST API for third-party tools. Two types of virtualization are supported: container-based with LXC (starting from version 4.0 replacing OpenVZ used in version up to 3.4, included), and full virtualization with KVM. It comes with a bare-metal installer and includes a Web-based management interface.
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Proxmox VE is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.
The name Proxmox itself has no meaning, and was chosen because the domain name was available.
History
Development of Proxmox VE started when Dietmar and Martin Maurer, two Linux developers, found out OpenVZ had no backup tool and no management GUI. KVM was appearing at the same time in Linux, and was added shortly afterwards. The first public release took place in April 2008, and the platform quickly gained traction. It was one of the few platforms providing out-of-the-box support for container and full virtualization, managed with a Web GUI similar to commercial offerings
Features
The main features of Proxmox VE are: it's open source, it allows live migration, it has high availability, bridged networking, flexible storage, OS template building, scheduled backup, and command line tools.
Storage model
Proxmox VE supports local storage with LVM group, directory and ZFS, as well as network storage types with iSCSI, Fiber Channel, NFS, GlusterFS, CEPH and DRBD
High-availability cluster
Proxmox VE can be clustered across multiple server nodes.
Since version 2.0, Proxmox VE offers a high availability option for clusters based on the Corosync communication stack. Individual virtual servers can be configured for high availability, using the Red Hat cluster suite. If a Proxmox node becomes unavailable or fails the virtual servers can be automatically moved to another node and restarted. The database- and FUSE-based Proxmox Cluster filesystem (pmxcfs) makes it possible to perform the configuration of each cluster node via the Corosync communication stack.
Live migration
In a HA cluster running virtual machines can be moved from one physical host to another without downtime.
Virtual appliances
Proxmox VE has pre-packaged server software appliances which can be downloaded via the GUI. It is possible to download and deploy appliances from the TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library.