All Articles

Bare metal wins on the two numbers that decide whether a game server feels good: worst-case tick time and worst-case latency. A single-tenant VM on hardware you control gets close. An oversold multi-tenant VPS is where fixed-tick simulation falls apart, because a vCPU scheduled a few milliseconds late is a missed tick every player sees as rubber-banding. This guide covers what a hypervisor adds to a tick loop, why the 95th-percentile tick time matters more than average throughput, how to measure steal time and MSPT on your own server, and when a VM is still the right call.

You have a bare-metal box and you want it to run virtual machines and containers instead of a single operating system. Proxmox VE turns that raw hardware into a full virtualisation platform: a Debian-based host with a web UI, KVM full virtualisation, LXC system containers, built-in storage and networking, and no per-socket hypervisor licence to buy. This guide walks the whole path from a blank server to a working host. We install Proxmox VE 9.2 from the ISO, fix the APT repositories and update, understand the default bridge networking, look at storage, build a first VM and a first LXC container, and finish with basic hardening. By the end you will have a production-ready single node you can grow into a cluster later.

Proxmox VE ships everything you need to never lose a VM, and the defaults use almost none of it. Snapshots that live on the same disk as the VM, one-off vzdump archives with no retention plan, and no restore testing is how virtualisation hosts actually get hurt. This guide builds the real strategy in three tiers: what snapshots are actually for, scheduled vzdump done properly (modes, retention, fleecing), and when Proxmox Backup Server's deduplication, verification, and offsite sync become worth a second box.

Proxmox VE gives you two ways to slice a server: full virtual machines via KVM, and LXC system containers that share the host's kernel. The right choice per workload is usually clear once you know the three questions that decide it: isolation, kernel, and migration. This guide explains how each actually works, compares them on the dimensions that matter operationally, settles the Docker question with Proxmox's own current guidance, and ends with a decision table you can apply per service.

Proxmox VE is a free, open-source virtualisation platform that runs directly on a physical server, turning one machine into a host for full virtual machines and lightweight containers. But it is not the only bare-metal hypervisor: VMware ESXi, XCP-ng, and Hyper-V all solve the same problem differently, and the right choice depends far more on licensing, clustering, and your team's ecosystem than on raw features. This guide explains what Proxmox VE actually is, what a bare-metal hypervisor means, and how the four main contenders compare on cost, management, high availability, storage, and backup, with a side-by-side table, an opinionated decision framework, and links to the right server to deploy it on.

Networking is where most new Proxmox installations stall: the install works, the first VM boots, and then "how do I give it an IP?" turns into an afternoon of half-matching forum threads. The underlying model is actually small: VMs plug into Linux bridges, and everything else is variations. This guide builds that model properly: what vmbr0 really is, bridged versus routed versus NAT setups on a hosting provider, VLAN-aware bridges, bonding done right, where the SDN layer fits, and how to change any of it without cutting yourself off.

Almost every Proxmox-vs-ESXi comparison is written for a homelab or by a backup vendor. This one is written for the person renting a dedicated server or running a small hosting fleet, where the constraints are IPMI-only recovery, single-tenant hardware, no SAN, and network configured at the host. It covers what the Broadcom licensing shift actually changed, what the reintroduced free ESXi can and cannot do, the bare-metal architecture differences that matter, the multi-node failure modes that bite in production (and their fixes), honest per-node cost math, and where ESXi still wins.

Post-VMware shortlists usually come down to these two: Proxmox VE, the Debian/KVM platform with everything integrated, and XCP-ng, the Xen-based XenServer descendant managed through Xen Orchestra. Both are genuinely production-grade and genuinely free; they just embody different philosophies about how a virtualisation platform should be built. This comparison covers the architectural split (KVM-in-Linux vs Xen-plus-dom0), the very different management and support models, storage and backup stories, current pricing on both sides, and a conditions-based verdict.