I never ran ESXi in production

A developer who chose Proxmox over VMware ESXi in 2024 reports that two years later, the decision still holds for small-scale deployments. The engineer highlights Proxmox's unified tooling for both containers and VMs, chunk-level deduplication in backups, and simpler clustering without a separate vCenter, while acknowledging that ESXi remains superior for enterprise compliance and support needs.

Most "why Proxmox" content in 2025-2026 is a migration story driven by Broadcom's ESXi pricing changes. The author had a working VMware stack and got priced out. I'm not that author. I evaluated both, picked Proxmox in 2024, and built on it without ever running ESXi in production. Two years in, I'd make the same call. It reads as either incompetent or contrarian until the rest of the post lands. Here's the reasoning. Most workloads in this homelab are LXCs. Pi-hole, Vaultwarden, Authelia, Traefik, the monitoring stack, GitLab CE itself, all containers sharing the host kernel. A few things need full VM isolation the NAS guest, Proxmox Backup Server, the Home Assistant OS appliance . Same hypervisor, same CLI, same web UI for both shapes of workload. The alternative is ESXi for the VMs and a separate toolchain containerd, Docker, Kubernetes, take your pick for the containers. That's two backup pipelines, two HA stories, two places for config drift to surprise you at 2 AM. pct exec 254 systemctl status authelia and qm start 189 are the same shape. New hires don't have to learn one tool for containers and a different one for VMs. Chunk-level deduplication. Backups across guests and across time share storage. A nightly backup of all 11 LXCs and 2 VMs runs in about ten minutes and adds a few hundred MB of new chunks, because most of the content is the same as yesterday. Cluster-scheduled. One job definition runs across every node in the cluster. No per-node cron, no manual rotation when a node moves. Restore to a different storage class. A backup taken from local-lvm on the G7 restores onto ZFS on a G5 cluster node without conversion gymnastics. Veeam Community Edition is the free comparison. It works. It also caps repository size, doesn't dedup at the chunk level, and lacks the cluster-aware scheduling that makes PBS feel like a built-in feature rather than a bolt-on. When backups are the load-bearing wall of a homelab, the part that lets me say yes to family data later, the free option that compromises least is the one that wins. ESXi clustering requires vCenter Server. vCenter is its own VM, its own database, its own patching cadence, its own license. The minimum production footprint to get HA is three ESXi hosts plus one vCenter plus shared storage. The vCenter VM itself also needs to be backed up off the cluster it manages. Proxmox does the same job from the per-node web UI. pvecm create , pvecm add from each new node, edit corosync.conf if the auto-detect picks the wrong network, done. HA failover policy is ha-manager add ct:256 --group g5-only . No separate management plane. Three-node cluster running. A real workload migrated to a different node on the night I shut down one of the cluster members. Total observability downtime: about a minute and a half. I want this post to read as opinionated, not as marketing. Ecosystem. VMware has decades of third-party integrations across storage vendors, backup vendors, networking overlays, and security tooling. Proxmox has fewer. If you need a specific compliance-certified storage appliance or a vendor-specific tooling chain, VMware is sometimes the only choice. Audit logging. Proxmox logs the basics. Deep audit trails with role hierarchy, per-action attestation, and tamper-evident logs are an ESXi + Aria stack feature that doesn't have a Proxmox equivalent. For SOC 2, HIPAA, or FedRAMP work this matters. For a homelab and a small team it doesn't. Support. The Proxmox Enterprise subscription exists and is reasonable, but the support contract isn't the same as VMware's. For 24/7 white-glove production support, ESXi still wins. For the small-team case, the community forums and the wiki are usually faster anyway. The honest summary: at small scale Proxmox wins on tooling unification, on free-tier capability, and on the speed at which you can change your mind. At enterprise scale the tradeoffs reverse. I haven't reconsidered in two years because the daily friction is low. The web UI does what I want, the CLI is consistent across LXC and VM, and the backup story stays one tool. Migrating a service between nodes is two commands; when a node falls over the cluster handles it. The homelab keeps growing. Every additional service is a new LXC or VM in the same pane of glass. The platform hasn't forced a new toolchain on me to keep up. The right tool depends on the scale you actually operate at. For mine, it's Proxmox. Originally published on iamkay.eu, where I write about running production infrastructure: the failures, the fixes, and the tradeoffs.