VMware user here

ITContributor

New Member
Jan 6, 2026
2
0
1
Hi everyone,

We’re still using VMware in our datacentre and want to move to Proxmox. For now, I’d like to test the transition with two Dell servers. Each server will have RAID 10 with two partitions: 50GB for the hypervisor and 2TB for the VM.

Could anyone suggest a way to deploy these two physical servers for testing?
 
You have not described what your actual use case is, workload, or any requirements.

Based on that, you can start with deployment of single server. Try things out and then come back asking more specific questions.

You can always extend the solo install to a cluster, although that comes with a set of additional requirements.


Good luck!

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox
 
Thank you for your prompt response. Our workload primarily consists of RDS and some database servers. Currently, we’re using it as a backup server with Veeam and a hardened repository. I’m not sure if Proxmox supports encryption for backups.
 
If you plan on using shared storage, your officially Proxmox supported options are Ceph & ZFS (they do NOT work with RAID controllers like the Dell PERC).

Both require an IT/HBA-mode controller. I use a Dell HBA330 in production with no issues.
 
I would say start with a single node, but also try a cluster setup before going into production. I would say that Proxmox has feature parity comparing to VMware looking from a single node. Looking at the cluster level, Proxmox still misses a few features comparing with VMware. I have to say that version 9 closed that gap significantly.

Regarding backups, I have to say that PBS works great(with an exception of a bug in kernel 6.17 that hopefully was fixed). Try it out, I would suggest using it as bare metal with ZFS.

Maybe if you would specify your requirements a bit better, I can give you some more info.
 
I've worked with a few companies who migrated huge load of RDSses so my recommendation is start with 3-node CEPH, 10g networking and work from that. Go up to let's say 10-15 nodes, then create new cluster. No problem with that.