I Spent a Year Running Proxmox and VMware Side by Side in My Home Lab

For years both personally and professionally VMware was simply the default. It was familiar, stable, and widely used in the workplace, so running it in both production and my home lab felt like the obvious choice.

Then Broadcom happened.

Almost overnight, VMware stopped making sense for anyone outside large enterprise environments. Smaller organisations and home lab enthusiasts were left in an awkward position, struggling to justify the cost and direction of the platform. With that shift underway, I decided to give Proxmox a serious try running it side by side with VMware in my home lab for an entire year.

I went into this expecting VMware to win easily. It didn’t.

This isn’t a “which hypervisor is best?” post. It’s a retrospective on what I learned, what surprised me, and why Proxmox ultimately changed how I run virtualised workloads today.

Stability and Hardware Compatibility Matter More Than You Think

One of my biggest takeaways from running Proxmox and VMware in parallel is that Proxmox is just as stable as VMware and in some areas, more compatible, particularly for home lab hardware.

VMware currently struggles with hardware support, especially networking. Native support for Realtek network adapters is gone, and while a VMware fling has attempted to bring it back, feedback suggests it is still unreliable. Many users report network interfaces disappearing or losing connectivity after a period of time.

Proxmox, by contrast, fully supports both Intel and Realtek NICs. That makes a big difference in home labs, where hardware choice is often dictated by cost and availability rather than strict compatibility lists. With VMware, you often need to specifically hunt for mini PCs with Intel network adapters just to stay supported.

Hybrid CPUs are another area where Proxmox quietly excels. Proxmox handles modern “big-little” CPU architectures out of the box. VMware, however, will often purple screen unless you manually add a boot parameter and make it persistent or disable efficiency cores entirely in the BIOS.

None of these VMware issues are catastrophic on their own, but they introduce friction. In a home lab, where you are already working with budget hardware and compromises, that friction adds up over time.

For me, stability isn’t just about avoiding crashes it’s about being able to forget the hypervisor exists. Proxmox delivered that experience far better than I expected and, in some cases, even better than VMware.

The Proxmox Web UI Has Definitely Grown Up

There’s no denying that VMware still has the more polished interface. It’s slick, modern, and refined—but that polish comes from many years of iteration. It’s also easy to forget that VMware’s UI hasn’t always been great. Anyone who lived through the old Flash-based web client will remember just how painful that era was.

Proxmox’s interface still feels like it’s maturing. Some workflows are less efficient than they could be, and the UI prioritises function over aesthetics. That said, it has improved significantly, and the trajectory is clearly positive.

While it may not yet match VMware’s level of refinement, it no longer feels like a weakness and for day-to-day management, it gets the job done without frustration.

Proxmox Datacenter Manager Changes the Game

One of the most important developments in the Proxmox ecosystem this year is the general availability of Proxmox Datacenter Manager and I think this is a turning point.

Historically, VMware’s biggest advantage was vCenter. It provided a true single pane of glass for managing multiple hosts and clusters. Proxmox, by comparison, felt fragmented, with management spread across individual nodes.

Datacenter Manager closes that gap. It allows you to manage multiple Proxmox hosts and clusters from a single interface, making the platform feel cohesive and enterprise-ready. You can see which hosts need updates, apply them centrally, and monitor overall health without logging into each system individually.

This is the first time Proxmox management has felt comparable to what vCenter has offered for years.

Backups: A Surprise Win for Proxmox

Backups and data protection have traditionally been an area where VMware dominated, thanks to its mature third-party ecosystem. That’s why this has been one of the biggest surprises for me over the past year.

Proxmox offers Proxmox Backup Server, a completely free, enterprise-grade backup solution. It includes deduplication, encryption, incremental backups, and fast restores features that typically come with a hefty price tag in the VMware world.

On top of that, major third-party vendors are now fully on board. Most notably, Veeam arguably the leader in hypervisor backups has added support for Proxmox. In day-to-day use, backing up Proxmox with Veeam feels almost identical to backing up VMware workloads.

That parity was not something I expected going into this experiment.

Final Thoughts

Running Proxmox and VMware side by side for a year fundamentally changed my perspective. VMware is still a strong platform, but its increasing complexity, hardware limitations, and shifting business model make it harder to justify especially for home labs and smaller environments.

Proxmox, meanwhile, has quietly matured into a stable, capable, and increasingly polished platform. It exceeded my expectations in almost every area that mattered and removed many of the pain points I had simply accepted as “normal” with VMware.

I didn’t expect Proxmox to win me over but it did.

#Proxmox #BackupServer #Virtualization #DataProtection #OpenSource #Veaam