 Tom here from One Systems, and since I did my recent video on XC PNG talking about VMware, it's because it's June of 2022, and we are still figuring out everything that's gonna happen with VMware based on its purchase by Broadcom. I'll leave a link to that video down below. But the most common question, and a good one at that, is what about Proxmox? When I posted this on LinkedIn, when I had this video on YouTube, I just see all the comments on there, and I wanted to clarify a couple things. One, I have nothing against Proxmox. There is this weird assumption a lot of people seem to have that if you like one tool, you must hate the other tool, or there's some terrible reason you're not using it. I'll admit that Proxmox and XC PNG are both open source. They are both good. They are both solid platforms to build your virtualization on. That being said, why did I choose XC PNG? I'm gonna put the details together for that. Now, this is not a me trying to convince you if you're a use case and the feature sets that I'm gonna cover here just don't line up, then keep using Proxmox if that's what you're happy with. That's one thing about tech is, especially in the open source world, you may get multiple answers of how to achieve something and they're both correct. There is just differences in the nuances, the way these things are implemented that one may work for you or another. So I wanted to get that out of the way at the beginning of the video. That way, if you are hoping that I'm gonna be a deciding factor, maybe I'm just here to drop some knowledge, but I'm not here to tell you which one to use. That's never my goal. I only like to share information, let people know what's available out there and let them make the decision, hopefully a more informed one. Before we get started, the details this video, let's first. 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And now back to our content. Now the first piece I wanna start with right here is my forums and everything I'll be talking about will be linked down below, including a series of videos I have on getting started with XCPNG and also a series of videos on getting started with Proxmox done by Jay from LearnLinux TV. So it's version seven, that's current as of June of 2022 for Proxmox and the latest version of XCPNG is version eight. Depending on when you're watching this, I may have the version eight videos done but there's not much difference in seven and eight. Now the other thing you have to note, Zen Orchestra is separate from XCPNG but I treat them as the same because they're supported by the same place. And it's one of those things I just wanna get out of the way is how Zen Orchestra integrates into XCPNG because this is a really important thing. The Zen Orchestra is the web orchestration tool that allows for the management and I treat them as one and the same but I know they are absolutely separate. This web orchestration tool has a one to many relationship with many, many hosts that you can have with XCPNG and resource pools you can build and one instance of Zen Orchestra to manage them all even if they're remote, even if they're remote in another data center. There's a lot of options on there to even have some advanced proxying options to have proxy workers that manage at a local site while you manage through your main site the Zen Orchestra interface. This is where there's a big difference between the way they're implemented because Proxmox for each host is a complete with web management and everything installed for every host and you group the hosts into their clusters. With Zen Orchestra, you use Zen Orchestra to take the hosts and group them in the clusters but the hosts themselves are very lightweight and don't really have any web interface on them. XO Lite is something you're working on in the future to give some basic management but your main tool is the Zen Orchestra tool. How that tool is sold and delivered. You can get a free version that has some limited functionality. They have a service delivery model which is keep you the latest version with a limited amount of support based on your subscription that you can buy for it or you can download the source code. People in the home lab that have done this are very well aware of how this works. You download the source code, you compile it. Yes, I have a video on how to do that and you get all the features built in to the open source one and you get a little note on there that says no support just like how Proxmox when you use a free version it says that you don't have their paid support for the professional support. So pretty simple, they have a similar model but you do have to compile it yourself so I will admit right off the beginning here that Zen Orchestra being separate does make it a little bit more challenging to get started with XCPNG especially because it runs as a VM. Now for those of you saying it's not lightweight this is where there's also a little bit of nuance to it because of the single Zen Orchestra instance being able to manage so many hosts you're not repeating the same web interface on all the hosts, you're using one single VM instance to manage all the different Zen installs that you have. So if you have 100, 200 XCPNG hosts each one because of limitation of 64 per pool you've grouped them all into pools you can manage all those pools and all those hosts through one Zen Orchestra interface that you loaded once. Now base operating system CentOS but highly customized. It's not just CentOS and you're getting support from CentOS which obviously with the changes that have occurred could be a problem. They are taking care of the support and all the updates and things that go within it versus Proxmox is based on Debian. High availability, yes, high availability supported in both of these. Max supported hosts per cluster. 64 was an orchestra for each pool that you group them into but with Proxmox it's a little bit less clear because it depends on the hardware as best I can understand from reading in the forums and her documentation. There's a reference in her documentation that says they have seen high end production systems with more than 50. I don't really have a number for you outside of what I read through their documentation. If you read through the forums a lot of people seem to think it should stop at around 32 before you run into problems. It has something to do with the way the synchronization works between the hosts. Container management, this may be a hard stop for some people. It is not natively supported inside of Xenorchestra or XCPNG but they do have LXC container management within Proxmox. Web console via Xenorchestra as I had mentioned and it's native to the system there. Live VM migration between hosts. Yes, you can just do live VM migration between the different hosts and you have to have them within the same cluster in Proxmox probably not a big deal for some people but you can actually do it to the other as I mentioned different resource pools you can migrate back and forth between with different ones even if they're not in the same resource pool. Live disk migration, yes and yes. Local storage, G documentation and shared storage, G documentation. There's a lot of storage support and there's a lot of details and they both implement things a little bit different. The first thing I will give a clear example of is ZFS. Yes, ZFS supported in XCPNG but no, when you do a snapshot in XCPNG it's still a virtual machine snapshot not a ZFS snapshot versus if you build on ZFS you're able to do ZFS snapshots within Proxmox because it talks natively to ZFS. So there's differences there. When it comes to shared storage yeah, there's a lot of different support in at first glance you may go but it looks like there might be a couple extra things that are supported on XCPNG versus Proxmox but the reality is it's Debbie and you could probably load the support for the other things on there. See documentation, think about your use case. Then provisioning depends on storage type for both of these but yes, it's supported. Max supported VM disk size of two terabytes. More than two terabytes depends on the back end. It is my opinion that attaching extremely large disk to virtual machines is not a wonderful idea. I generally prefer and we use Windows as an example if you build a Windows machine but you have eight terabytes of data you'd like to have shared across Windows. Presenting an ice cause the extent inside of Windows would be a better way to handle it alternatively using an ass. Attaching an eight terabyte VM when you wanna back up the VMs. Less of a good idea in my opinion. Go ahead and hate me in the comments down below and tell me you liked attaching 16 terabytes at a time or eight terabytes at a time to any particular VM but I have generally found that to be a little bit harder to manage and not the best way to implement it. Usually you want it to be small, lightweight so you can back up your operating system very easily, snapshot it easily, migrate it between hosts if or shared storage locations without having to wait for 16 terabytes to move. Just my thoughts but hey, leave yours down below. Hyperconverged setup, XoSan versus SEPH and ZFS options they have. So they have a couple of different ways you can do hyperconverged in Proxmox. I'm not gonna get into the details of it but XoSan and XoSan V2 is coming. Update management and automation. Yes, via the Xenorca show or via the package manager. Yes, via the web interface or via the package manager. It goes a little bit more extensive in Zen because you gotta roll your pool updates and you don't want any one pool having to be reset with too many resources on it. They actually have some really neat features when it comes updating to automate all of that of restarting all the servers and migrating things between clusters if it's HA. So there's actually a little bit of more nuance to that if you wanna dive into the details of it. So check the documentation or watch some of the videos I have on some of those topics. An accredited council, yes. Advanced networking, this is a C documentation. So VXLAN, SDN, Firewall, where you can create specialized network adapters on there. Know these platforms have not implemented them the same way but they do have these extended features that you can do such as VXLAN or that private network adapter that you want across different hosts. There's ways to do that in both of these but go to the documentation to see about the details of how they're implemented including the firewall options that are available or IP restricting options that are available for both of them. Cloud in it, Cloud in it does work in both of these. Now the backups is the last thing I'm gonna mention but we're gonna go into the demo here in a minute to show you the web interfaces between them and that's where there's gonna be a significant difference but the backup specifically is really basic in just Proxmox. They have their separate Proxmox backup appliance which has more backups. Jay from LearningLink TV has a video on that as well I'll be linked down below but yes the backup is fully integrated into Zen Orchestra and gives you quite a large array of scheduling and features and including one feature that's really cool that I just did a video on which is auto restore testing to validate your backups on an automated schedule where it actually goes through and fully restores the VM, verifies that the VM boots, shuts the VM down and destroys it. It can do that on an automated or one-off basis because you wanna check a restore and not just check it and go through a manual process but actually automate that process and that's a really cool feature that's integrated in there. Now as I said in the beginning, I'm not a big Proxmox user but I've gone through the setup and I did not find it particularly difficult to set up to get working, to attach an ice guzzie to, to load a VM in and I went through it and this is what it looks like. Now I'm not gonna spend too much time on the interface but it's got the basics, it's got the things you need and it works. That's the bottom line, it wasn't hard, it's relatively easy to go through, set these settings in here, see what's going on, here's your cloud init settings, options, boot order but what I meant is it's a little rigid when it comes to things like how you might want to name something or manage something. It is compared to the way Zen Orchestra which I will cover more in depth a little bit later here in a video where that is the killer feature is how you manage things at scale in Zen Orchestra but it's very manageable in here. You just don't have quite as many features like here's one of the backups, I can say backup now, create a snapshot, suspend it, how do you want to do all the modes? Everything's here and UI is not difficult by any measure but one thing I did find a little bit interesting when I was going through this is when I went through the storage and if I look at the local storage, well not there, let's go back to the data center view and it's this right here where I can see how much is available here but when I click on like the Synology Ice because you want it doesn't seem to show anything here but that's actually where my VM is running. So I'm not 100% sure what I did wrong for that not to show up, I also had a weird issue and it would connect but not give me an error but it wouldn't work, the VM would fail. So those were a couple of things but could completely be me and completely be a problem I had because it was a problem on the Synology side where I had a permission wrong for the Ice Guzzi when I set it up and I wasn't able to find it here until I connected it to Zen Orchestra which told me it had a permission error and I fixed the permission error and went back over here in Proxmox and then it connected again but once again didn't give me an error but actually let me build the VM on it. So there's been a couple of little nuances I found like that, a little strange but completely could be me, I'm not ruling that out but overall I didn't find this to be a challenging or difficult interface at all to use to get things done the monitoring looks decent on here but other things like where it goes back and forth between the command line sometimes a little bit confusing for me but that's just me being new to Proxmox for those of you that use it a lot like Jay has well, it's gonna be a lot easier. Now XTP and G on the other hand I find the interface more intuitive. Like I said, this is still all opinion as far as that goes but hey people wanna know what the interface looks like. Now this is our two pools, four hosts and 55 virtual machines. This is where you'll start to notice the big differences between these different platforms. If we go over here to home and we see that it's filtered for Tom you can create all these cool filtered views to filter and tag different VMs. You can see the tags this way. So these are tags for Tom or tags for Tom test machines. So we can click on any of these tags and filter and pivot between them or Eric, one of my other staff he's got some machines here so now I can filter to all of the things that Eric is working on. He's working on and restoring and testing a few different backup systems so this is how we do that. While you're doing it you can see and we'll go into like Eric's Win 10 system I can go over here to the console if I needed to see what's going on there. I can go to the network here I can click on the different IPs that it has apparently it's got a few different interfaces. If I click on them it just copies the IPs to the clipboard. I can even we'll go back to one of my VMs I don't mess with Eric. Let's go to this right here. Tom's lab we're gonna go and start this VM so it has a console that comes up. You can see the stats on it. Everything's nice to me and laid out tab-wise like this. Now back to these tags if we add a tag like this we're gonna add YouTube as a tag we can go back over here to home put YouTube in and these are things I tagged with YouTube which does include running a nested version of Proxmox for a YouTube video. How does nested virtualization work? Yeah just a button right here. How about loading the tools and this is a really important one I've covered before if you would like the Windows update to automatically load the tools when you load Windows VMs so you have the different access to the network information with Windows well you just check this little box right here you have to do it with the VMs off it's gonna give you an error but other than stopping the VM you just hit that and away you go. Present from Accidental Deletion or Accidental Shutdown or Auto Paran or all just little toggles right here that you can do. So pretty simple in terms of changing anything on here I do everything from the Zen Orchestra I don't use any other tools to manage any of my Zen servers it's really all done through these interfaces right here and some of them you can even drag if you wanna change boot orders turn devices on and off and hit save. For stop force restart. Back over to our things that say YouTube like this right here swapping networks so currently this has got 172, 1669 we just booted it but what if we wanna move it and we have a bunch of different network adapters in here because we simulate things we have all these different resources in here but let's move it to I think we call it the Pwnage Pool so it's another VLAN that we have it'll take a second it's gonna refresh and then it will have a new IP address all this happens without refreshing the page or restarting the VM all the interface updates in real time and kind of an easy example I'm gonna give of that so I'm gonna look over to you my right and type in test and you can see in real time I'm updating somewhere else this is actually really handy for when me and my staff and all of us are working on different things we can actually keep seeing each other's renaming and changing of things dynamically the interfaces constantly being updated now back to the tagging feature and why that makes a lot of sense too for things like storage we're always testing things we're a lab and environment a lot and that's how I make some of my YouTube videos or we're standing up things for clients we can type in lab and I'm gonna expand it out here these are all the different lab resources for storage right now lab trinity pool you can see I got tags and some of these or some of them are attached to the different lab servers that are in here this is what gives you a lot of power when it comes to doing things and it's not just for finding them or viewing them it also gets related to things like backup so if we go back over to VMs and let's look at our production VMs and let's click on one of them and it's easy cleaning up the interface we'll just reduce it back down go here I have two tags on this one's critical one's production so if we click on critical these are all the things I refer to as critical so we're gonna go back over to here we're gonna look at our backups here's the backup jobs attached to this particular VM because I said backup things that are critical with this thing right here it says full backup while critical systems so if we over here drop the critical tag go to the backups it's gone if we go back over here to the general tab we add critical back to it and it's back the way that works is really simple so you go here to your backups which we can actually go here overview we'll type in critical for the backup we're gonna click edit and we see we're backing up things with this tag you can add VM tags to include or exclude or even do scheduling there's a lot of things are all based on VM tags this allows you to add things to production without having to go back in and change any of your backup you just have a tag that you know like critical that you want for a certain backup job as it runs and you'll just add that tag this allows just a wild amount of flexibility when it comes to moving resources around when it comes to having all the backups now while on the topic of backups there's also the remotes and what the remotes are is all the different storage destinations for backups this is all handled by Zen Orchestra so even though we have we go back over to our pools we have our lab pool and our pool is then which is more like our production pool the backup system is able to do backups simultaneously to different pools or to different storage targets as I see fit this is actually really nice from a flexibility standpoint that even though I can have production and non-production environments managed in one single interface the backups I can set the resource pools so we go back over here and actually look at what those look like we go here to remotes offsite production backups production backups and the lab backups I have three separate storage destinations for them that way on my back end I have different backup strategies because I don't bother backing up all the stuff that is inside of here for the lab backups but obviously the offsite ones those get a synchronized offsite so I don't want the constant rolling backups that occur here to production backups so this is still production backup but this diversity is what is really cool about it because you can choose whatever you want to be your storage target I'm using just standard SMB protocol tied to a TrueNAS as my destination and then for my TrueNAS I send it off but nonetheless it's the interface flexibility that I like so much for example we'll look at this Proxmox demo and we can just do this call it whatever we want it actually lets us put a pretty long name in here with whatever we need and I can also do this but I won't I could type all I want there so I can give some really solid descriptions of what these are and when you have as I showed here if we go back over to the overview and you have 55vms and there's going to be a lot more soon with the project we're doing you kind of need to start grouping and tagging things together to make that just easier to manage now one more thing I'm going to note is how you handle logging users because we are a multi-user environment so I have the email address is blurred out but we can go through and figure out who did what when and it has an entire nice log that has immutable integrity to make sure that this has been not tampered with this is just really an important feature when you're going through and someone did something who did what when that's an important aspect and of course it's completely searchable including finding out when Tom added the tag YouTube to a couple different things that can be found just like that or we can go back to critical and you can see tag remove tag add and Tom did that there so there's a lot of logging that goes on inside of here speaking of user management I will mention because someone may ask I didn't really cover it in detail when I was comparing the two because there's a little bit more nuance to that as well but when you go into the plugins there is Auth GitHub Auth Google Auth LDAP Auth SAML so there's multiple ways you can authenticate and federate against other services if you need to there's also a NetBox plugin if you're not familiar with NetBox look it up for IP management performance alerting their software defined network and controller the transport email Nagios Slack notifications usage report and some web hooking options to get you know a little bit more advanced if you need to now as I said at the beginning I favor XCPNG but I don't see any problems of Proxmox especially if there's some feature like LXC container management that you prefer then stay with it there's not a reason I can tell you like oh no get off Proxmox it's bad it's unstable because that's not true it is a good platform it is a stable platform doesn't mean my preference isn't for XCPNG and I especially love these in orchestra interface and how it handles things at scale like managing lots and lots of VMs and we've worked with some clients and that's sometimes what we're demoing stuff is putting together a project in-house that we are proof of concepting for a larger client that may need it and that being said you kind of need that manageability if you have like you know 800-900 VMs that you have to shuffle around based on criteria or change backup rules on and not having to modify 800 backup jobs and or when you move them in and out adding a tag so they go or belong to certain backup jobs makes that job just a lot easier when you're doing things at scale so I guess that's maybe one takeaway from this depends on if you're a smaller or larger environment smaller environments if you just need the more basic features of Proxmox great if you go man I really need those features because we're trying to figure out how to handle 800 VMs in a reasonable way and that seems to be easier to do in my opinion inside of XCP and G let me know your comments down below head over to the forums for a more in-depth discussion thanks for watching and look forward to hearing from you