Introduction

The Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) is an open source multinode clustered hypervisor built on Debian Linux, and is able to run on commodity hardware, thus eliminating any vendor lock ins. Proxmox is freely available without any features locked. However, a subscription type license is available to enable a enterprise repository to receive well-tested patches and updates. Subscriptions are recommended for a production-level Proxmox environment.

Note

A hypervisor is a software or firmware that creates a layer between native hardware and an operating system to form a virtual environment to create and run virtual machines. A hypervisor emulates the functions of physical hardware to enable virtual machines to see them as physical resources.

Proxmox can be configured to run a virtual environment of just a few nodes with virtual machines or an environment with thousands of nodes. Supporting both KVM and OpenVZ container-based virtual machines, Proxmox VE is a leading hypervisor today. Proxmox has an extremely vibrant community ready to provide help to any free Proxmox users. Also, the expert technical support team of Proxmox is equally capable of handling all corporate users with their mission critical virtual environment.

As mentioned earlier, Proxmox is a multinode environment, meaning that many nodes can form a single cluster where a virtual machine can be moved around to any node within the cluster, thereby allowing a redundant virtual environment. Through a robust Graphical User Interface (GUI), the entire Proxmox cluster can be managed. As of Proxmox VE 3.4, only one cluster is manageable through the GUI.

Here are some of the notable features of the Proxmox VE:

• It provides a multinode cluster environment for virtualization. No single node acts as a master, thus eliminating single points of failure.
• It provides High Availability (HA) of virtual machines.
• It gives centralized web-based management and a single interface to manage an entire cluster.
• A console can be accessed through secured VNC, SPICE, and HTML5-based noVNC.
• It provides support for multiple authentication sources, such as local using Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM), Microsoft ADS, and LDAP.
• A Proxmox cluster file system (pmxcfs) can be used to store configuration files for real-time replication on all nodes using corosync (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corosync_%28project%29).
• It provides role-based permission management for objects VMs, storages, nodes, pools, and so on.
• Unlike SOAP, REST is not a protocol but combination of various standards such as HTTP, JSON, URI and XML. Visit http://www.restapitutorial.com for information on REST based APIs.
• It provides a built-in powerful firewall for host nodes and virtual machines.
• It provides migration of VMs between physical hosts with or without shared storage.
• It supports mainstream storage types, such as Ceph, NFS, ZFS, Gluster, and iSCSI.
• It provides cluster-wide logging.