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Dev.to
7/26/2026
I never ran ESXi in production

I never ran ESXi in production

Short summary

The author chose Proxmox over ESXi in 2024 without prior VMware production experience, citing unified container/VM management, chunk-level dedup backups via PBS, and no separate management plane for clustering. At small scale Proxmox wins on tooling unification and free-tier capability; at enterprise scale ESXi still wins on compliance, support, and ecosystem integrations. Two years in, the author has no regrets.

  • •Proxmox unifies LXC containers and VMs under one CLI/UI, unlike ESXi which needs a separate container toolchain
  • •Proxmox Backup Server offers chunk-level dedup and cluster-scheduled jobs for free; Veeam Community Edition caps repository size and lacks dedup
  • •ESXi still wins at enterprise scale for compliance audit logging, white-glove support, and third-party ecosystem integrations

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.

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