Jason Perlow over at ZDNet Blogs today wrote an interesting article about ProxMox, a Vienna, Austria-based Open Source turnkey virtualization server provider we weren’t aware of until this day. Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) is basically an easy to use Open Source virtualization platform for running Virtual Appliances and Virtual Machines.
ProxMox VE, which is is licensed under GPLv2, boasts:
- Pre-built Virtual Appliances
- Install and manage with a view clicks
- Selection of products for the use in the enterprise
Proxmox VE is optimized for performance and usability. For maximum flexibility, the following virtualization technologies are installed by the bare metal ISO-installer. It leverages two virtualization platforms, OpenVZ and KVM.
As Jason writes:
In a nutshell, ProxMox VE is a bare-metal install CD that contains a highly-tweaked version of Debian Etch that is optimized for use as a virtualization server, using a modified Linux kernel which includes all the support needed for KVM and OpenVZ. The system runs completely headless and in a light configuration — the entire install CD is only 250MB. To take advantage of ProxMox VE, you’ll want a 64-bit CPU that supports the Intel VT or AMD-V instruction sets, such as recent Core Duo, Xeon, AMD64 Athlon X2 or Opteron chips. You’ll also want at least 2GB of RAM to run a few virtual machines/virtual environments comfortably.
Read the rest of the article here.