When I watch LTT videos. I always think, "I am sick of every video being a thinly veiled advert"

When watching L1T: "I am not smart as I thought I was"

I use a 3 node PVE cluster to run our servers in healthcare IT. I came from VMWare at my old job. I used to say PVE was "poor man's VMWare". However, after using it for 5+ years now in production I have to say I'm very impressed with it. Ceph w/ NVME DAS is legit amazing albeit a bit complex. I use two PBS servers on bare metal as a primary and secondary backup repository. I like that it integrates easily into PVE since it's Proxmox designed. I support 300+ users, 500+ endpoints, across 13 sites, with just myself and two T1 techs. We are all "jack/jane of all trades". We do everything from password resets to the data-center. I wish I had enough time to really dig into PVE more.

Wendell, you are incredible. This content is so helpful it's insane. You are truly a treasure to the IT community. Thank you for everything you do!

Storage set is very important in Proxmox. My first experience with proxmox was terrible. I even replaced my hardware trying to solve the issue. It later turned out to be my fault. I picked the wrong storage. Replaced my VM pool with a few NVME drives and bam everything worked perfectly. Do not cheap out on storage!

dedicated SDN video? yeeeeeeessss

Oh boy, a ProxMox video! (I say, having been entrenched in ProxMox since 2017).

03:08 wendell finally tripped and revealed himself to be a time traveler

Please do a video or a couple on SDN. Please.

Check out our previous OpenMetal io Proxmox Tutorial video here: https://youtu.be/AbPwR0x4uNU

This is fascinating.  Most of my troubles have been around the performance of high volume layer 2 traffic that needs high bandwidth access to the underlying hardware in a network trunk (multple vlans to one or more VMs or containers).  The licensing issues you mentioned also come into play with Broadcom locking up SR-IOV behind an expensive license.  Proxmox and XCP-ng provide excellent potential, as well as raw virtio/macvtap scenarios.    While Tom does dig into networking performance and related issues, he tends to stay focused on things that would impact his enterprise customer base.  You're probably the only one I've seen get close to the actual low-level stuff.  If you do create an SDN series, I'd be interested in seeing how you could tackle layer 2 trunks.  It's the unfortunate world I find myself in, and I'd enjoy seeing the unbiased approach from another expert.  Especially when it comes to sharing that high performance, low-level access with multiple VMs or containers.

Wendell, thanks for a wonderful explanation of these topics and things to know about ProxmoxVE.

Thank you so much for this. VMWare was my goto for literally everything, and I knew as soon as they were selling to those bastards that it was the end of innovation and an amazing technology stack. Fuck them all now. I cannot stand how vile they are being to customers and how all of the companies who work with their stack are going the same way. I'm trying to escape their grasp at my own companies and it's proving to be an outright nightmare for all of my teams. This is definitely something I'm going to have all of them look into, and how we can start putting more resources into making these tools better.

Year ago I used the VMware ESXi free server for my homelab, which became the paid server, which became the free server, which became ... Fault finding was painful. Tolerance with "non-standard" (ie: anything AMD or Realtek) was a nightmare. 10 years ago I switched to Proxmox and have never looked back. Having engineered corporate VMware clusters and upgrades, I'm amazed Proxmox hasn't got much traction with customers getting absolutely reamed by VMware but I offer it as a workable solution to all my clients

I think the biggest things I noticed vs VMware is that there are a lot fewer guardrails in ProxMox, which is both a good and bad thing. It will allow you to do some pretty flexible, less than ideal configurations which is great for homelab or lower budgets. (CEPH vs VSAN)

But it will also let you do things like live-migrate a VM to an incompatible host without warning you, so the VM hard resets. You need to be a bit more careful because ProxMox will not save you from yourself.

Got 15 minutes through before I realised I have no idea what Wendell is talking about. But I do enjoy his commentary.

I'm a proxmox refugee, but I already migrated my lab from esxi 7

Love these types of videos. So content dense with high quality perspective. Wendell is truly a gem.

Wendell, your expertise in this area in incredible. Thank you for openly sharing this to help people.

Awesome! Thanks for telling me this is not the video in looking for right at the beginning rather than letting me sit here pulling my hair out and getting discouraged! You're the man.

8:04 you rock for mentioning this. It can save serious IO, as well as allowing you to cache more pages you actually need in memory.