My two cents on Proxmox

[jplorier]

Hi everybody,

I'd like to say that you have a great product, with many great features that makes it a good choise to create a corporate virtualization environmet. But I need to say that the poor and few documentation (outdated wiki posts, no man pages, --help almost inexistent) make it almost imposible to choose it for a production environment. If you can take sometime to make documentation more robust and uptodate with the releases, you'll make this plataform a real choise.
I'm affraid that I have to leave to ovirt for this matter as I've installed my nodes with proxmox and planned to buy the license for support, but as everystep is a fight to get info about how to go on.
Keep on this great project and don't miss sight of documentation that is almost as importat as the software itself.
Regards,

 

[tom]

almost all commands got man pages. which one do you miss?

 

[dietmar]

Keep on this great project and don't miss sight of documentation that is almost as importat as the software itself.

Every command and each parameter for the whole API is well documented. See

http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_VE_API

for a short intro.

The full API is documented here: http://pve.proxmox.com/pve2-api-doc/

There is even a formal description of the API using JSON schema.

All important command line tool have man pages.

 

[mir]

almost all commands got man pages. which one do you miss?

Sometimes people mistakenly substitute documentation with step-guides for the impatience or for people without real knowledge. The wiki, the json API, the forum, and google can get you very close to a reasonable solution. The last part of the road requires trial and errors. Another god principle if one wants help from the community is to demonstrate that one have done a real effort to solve the problem before turning to the community for advice. The community is visited frequently by very knowledge people doing this kind of stuff for there living and provided people seeking knowledge demonstrates willingness and listens to the advice given from those people you can get professional help free of charts. I think this community is outstanding in these matters

 

[wahmed]

Here goes my 2 canadian cents.......

I have been using Proxmox for about a year now. Prior to that i was mostly hanging out with Hyper-V and VMWare. But as many Linux lovers, i much rather not hang out with expansive big boys like Microsoft, vmware. As alternative i looked into Xen, Foss, VirtualBox(Ya, i know), and other linux based solution, till one day i stumbled upon Proxmox. I do not consider myself Linux expert. I know enough to barely get by. But the Proxmox installation was very straight forward. Since then i installed Proxmox hypervisor environment many many time over to emulate different scenarios. I would be lieing if i said i did not break it few times, but it was mostly due to other free products i was trying to use in conjuction with Proxmox, like OpenFiler for example. After countless testing i was confident enough to drop Proxmox in 4 full fledged production environment. Proxmox and FreeNAS seems to be holding out way better than expected.
True, the wiki documentation could be improved a little, but there are people who wrote very good how-tos on Proxmox. Anything advanced like error messages, head scratching mysteries mostly can be solved through the forum. Given the free nature of the software, i would not hesitate to make bold statement that, Proxmox is "the" best open source Hypervisor out there, hands down. I am saying it because only i know how much time i have spent looking for a program tat "just works" without crumbling budget. Specially in a situation where "The IT Guy" has to do with what they got without any hope for financial backing. I found most of my answer just by browsing the forum. And when i did ask something, i was not disappointed so far.
Anybody who is seriously thinking of or sitting on the fence, i highly recommend Proxmox. Go with Proxmox and FreeNAS, you will have a very stable vm environment.

I am not paid or affiliated with Proxmox in any way. I am just another IT guy like most of you here who wants to free Network all over the world from the hands of "Big Boys" like hyper-v, vmware. I once read in an article "Proxmox is the best kept secret in the IT world. Big Boys do not want you to know Proxmox." The comment is very very true.

 

[jplorier]

Hi everybody,

I really like finding out that some things changed since last time I tried to use proxmox for production. I installed version 2.2 at that time and most of the info in the wiki was about prior versions where the commands had different syntaxis and many other thigs were different, like the fuse fs used for /etc/pve which had me weeks trying to solve what looked like a common rookie mistake of creating the datacenter on both hosts. Believe me, I'm not an expert in linux but neither a rookie and I had to configure most things googling and asuming things from prior versions based on trial-error-reinstall.
Having man pages for the commands like pvecm didn't meen that they are usefull. I miss said that you didn't have man pages, what I should have said is that man pages have almost only the syntax of the command, which is mostly useless if you don't know the usage.
What I try to say is that "pvecm help add" shows what are the parameters, but has no more information and if you don't know what votes are for, you'll never know what to put for that parameter.
Maybe it was me who didn't know where to look, but believe me, I searched a lot. Compare this in example with "man engine-setup" from ovirt and you'll see the difference.
Anyway, this hole thing was to tell you that I liked proxmox a lot and found that in my opinion, you have to work harder on documentation to make it even better for guys like me that used xen for a long time but never created a virtualization cluster.
Regards,

 

[tom]

Do you really telling us that setting up ovirt cluster is easier than Proxmox VE? Looks we live in a different world.

BTW, creating a cluster with pvecm is explained in detail in our wiki - in fact its just one self-explaining command. pvecm create ...

http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_VE_2.0_Cluster