[SOLVED] Newbie Questions

[llamprec]

Greetings,

I am very new to PROXMOX, did my first install last week. I am very sorry if my questions are posted in the wrong place but I cannot seem to find the answers trawling through the site.

My first question is, I understand that PROXMOX is released under the free license agreement, why is it then that I am told I need a subscription?
Secondly, when browsing through the documents on pricing, I found the following statement. "The subscription model is based on the number of physical servers and CPU sockets". I am a little confused by this statement because this implies that I will be using your servers. Can you please clarify.

Lastly, looking at the pricing, again I will be installing the software onto my own servers, If I select to purchase the Community license, how does it work because I see it says it will cost € 95/year & CPU socket. Does this mean that I need to pay the amount per CPU socket? How does this work for costs?

Thanks
Lawrence

 

[Dunuin]

My first question is, I understand that PROXMOX is released under the free license agreement, why is it then that I am told I need a subscription?

You can use Proxmox products with or without a subscription. There are no artificial limits or missing features when not buying an subscription. What you primarily pay for is support and access to the more stable (better tested) enterprise repository.
See the wiki on how to replace the default Enterprise repo with the free No-Subscription repo: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Package_Repositories#sysadmin_no_subscription_repo

Secondly, when browsing through the documents on pricing, I found the following statement. "The subscription model is based on the number of physical servers and CPU sockets". I am a little confused by this statement because this implies that I will be using your servers. Can you please clarify.

Lastly, looking at the pricing, again I will be installing the software onto my own servers, If I select to purchase the Community license, how does it work because I see it says it will cost € 95/year & CPU socket. Does this mean that I need to pay the amount per CPU socket? How does this work for costs?

It means your own server. If you got 3x two socket servers and 3x single socket servers you got 9 sockets in total so a community license would be 9x 95€ per year = 855€ per year when running PVE on your own 6 servers.

But the community license will just give you access to the enterprise repository. If you want guaranteed fast support you need to use choose a higher subscription level. Basically, be more you pay, the faster the support will be and the more often you can create support tickets.

 

[llamprec]

You can use Proxmox products with or without a subscription. There are no artificial limits or missing features when not buying an subscription. What you primarily pay for is support and access to the more stable (better tested) enterprise repository.
See the wiki on how to replace the default Enterprise repo with the free No-Subscription repo: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Package_Repositories#sysadmin_no_subscription_repo

It means your own server. If you got 3x two socket servers and 3x single socket servers you got 9 sockets in total so a community license would be 9x 95€ per year = 855€ per year when running PVE on your own 6 servers.

But the community license will just give you access to the enterprise repository. If you want guaranteed fast support you need to use choose a higher subscription level. Basically, be more you pay, the faster the support will be and the more often you can create support tickets.

Thanks for the reply, but let me play Devils advocate here a little.
If I install the software on my own servers, and I decide to only register a single CPU. meaning that I will only pay the 95 euros a year for the lowest package. What is stopping me from running multiple servers and multiple CPUs on that single license?

Thanks for teh clarity
Lawrence

 

[birdy]

What is stopping me from running multiple servers and multiple CPUs on that single license?

Your conscience?

And Proxmox probably, when registering the license, is checking if you are playing by the rules (number of cores and server-ID).

To be honest I think is pretty simple. If you use it privately the No-subscription-repo is stable enough and if you want the extra stability pay for the license (assuming you have not that many cores).

If you are in a professionel environment the costs compared to other products are very reasonable.

Just my 2 cents. -;

 

[llamprec]

Your conscience?

And Proxmox probably, when registering the license, is checking if you are playing by the rules (number of cores and server-ID).

To be honest I think is pretty simple. If you use it privately the No-subscription-repo is stable enough and if you want the extra stability pay for the license (assuming you have not that many cores).

If you are in a professionel environment the costs compared to other products are very reasonable.

Just my 2 cents. -;

@Dunuin

Thanks for your honesty, your 2 cents is exactly what I was looking for. I am a support engineer and have been for some 30 years now and I think that it is always better to be honest and pay for good work, but in saying that I 100% disagree with the Microsoft logic, at some point enough money is enough money. I feel a reasonable price should always be paid for a good product. Supporting the product is something else.

Can you please clarify why it is necessary to charge per CPU socket and not just pay for a license per customer?

Also, are you saying that if I choose to use the free version, that I cannot ask questions on the community forums?

Thanks
Lawrence

 

[Dunuin]

@Dunuin
Can you please clarify why it is necessary to charge per CPU socket and not just pay for a license per customer?

There are people who just run Proxmox VE on a single tiny Thin-client with a dualcore CPU at home for personal or educational use. And then there are big companies running thousands of servers in the cloud generating millions of dollars income by making use of proxmox software. So a license per customer really doesn't make much sense. Proxmox is not an non-profit organisation, even if everyone can use their products for free, because it is all fully open source. Its a company and the staff, offices, pensions, insurances, ... need to be payed each month. So its just fair if you pay more, the more servers you run. And that you pay per socket and not per host also makes sense and is common when licensing enterprise software. A single server with 4 sockets can get the same work done as four single socket server, so you also should pay the same for both.

So I think this is really fair. If you don't care about downtime, because you don't loose money when your servers aren't working, you can run proxmox products without a license without missing features (except for support tickets and the more stable repo). Great for homelabs for learning, public schools who don't have the budget for IT, people who just want to run a small 300€ Thin-Client for home automation and so on.
If you want to support the Proxmox team and appreciate their work you can get a supporter license and get access to the enterprise repo as a small bonus.
If you are a company that makes money by relying on Proxmox products you really should get one of the higher level licenses. That way you get the guaranteed fast help when needed and (I guess) thats the primary income of the proxmox company. The more money they get, the more staff they can hire to speed up software developement and support.

Also, are you saying that if I choose to use the free version, that I cannot ask questions on the community forums?

You can always ask for help in the community forums. And unlike with many other companies the Proxmox staff will read/answer most threads if you got a lisense or not. And the community will also try to help.
But if you rely on your server and care about downtime you really should consider getting a license that includes support tickets. Lets say you encounter a problem and your servers won't boot anymore. If you ask for help in the community forums it might take several days until you get help and the servers are running again. If you got a license above the supporter level you get additional access to the support tickets where it is guarateed that the Proxmox support team will have a look at your problem within a limited time. With the highest level license you will get unlimited support tickets, guaranteed support in within 2 hours (on workdays, might be slower on the weekend) and they might even SSH into your server to fix stuff for you. So thats really not a bad price.
Just calculate what it would cost you when a server is offline for week. Maybe you are running a webshop and people can't buy stuff for a week. Or you got a small company where people can't do their work because the IT is offline but you still need to pay your staff while not being able to create income because nothing is working. That all will cost you way more than the 295-890€ per socket per year.

 

[llamprec]

Again @Dunuin Thanks for your answers. I am running this on a two CPU rig at home to learn. I am going into a new support job next week and the guy uses PROXMOX, I assume it is licensed, will find out when I start.

My last question, I have installed KVM on my current server, should I uninstall KVM and install PROXMOX or can I leave KVM in place and install PROXMOX as well to manage the server and VMS? How does PROXMOX wotk with an already installed KVM installation.

Thanks
Lawrence