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.