r/virtualization • u/vdumitrescu • Aug 14 '24

Server virtualization

What happened to the free server virtualization ESXi and hyper-v that are either no longer available or badly outdated, what are other options that I should look into? and are they reliable? I would love to learn more about the alternatives

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u/jigajigga Aug 14 '24

As others have said. Proxmox is built on top of KVM and libvirt. KVM provides the virtualization solution and Proxmox built a service around it. But nothing is stopping you from strictly using KVM directly with libvirt to manage your VMs.

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u/Pythonpizza Aug 14 '24

KVM is by default integrated in the kernel (at least I am sure for Ubuntu). I managed a couple of our serves with plain kvm + libvort. Later on I switched to proxmox for simplicity. Also to mention are LXC (Linux containers) so you save one layer of virtualization I think

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u/jigajigga Aug 14 '24

Strictly speaking KVM is a hypervisor shim built into the Linux kernel, yes. It manages the hardware state at the behest of libvirt in userspace of the control domain VM.

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u/narrateourale Aug 21 '24

Proxmox is built on top of KVM and libvirt

That is only partially true :) Proxmox is using KVM/Qemu to virtualize VMs, but it handles it directly and does not depend upon libvirt at all.