Proxmox VE celebrates its 10-year anniversary

April 16, 2018

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VIENNA, Austria – April 16, 2018 – This week marks the tenth anniversary of the open-source project Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), developed and maintained by Austrian-based Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH. The complete open-source platform for enterprise virtualization was announced in a first public version 0.9 exactly ten years ago on April 15, 2008 and the software allowed to manage KVM and OpenVZ on a single management interface. Since then, five major and numerous minor versions of Proxmox VE have been produced.

Today, the current version Proxmox VE 5.1 allows system administrators  to control their entire virtualized IT environment with a single management tool. The comprehensive Proxmox VE feature-set supports two virtualization technologies (KVM and LXC – since version 4.0), includes flexible networking, a RESTful API, a high availability cluster stack, software-defined storage, backup/restore functionality, a firewall, and many more out-of-the-box tools and seamlessly integrated open-source technologies. Since version 5.1 Proxmox VE also integrates Ceph storage 12.2.x Luminous LTS, for building hyper-converged infrastructures.

Two virtualization technologies on a single platform

Ten years ago the Proxmox developers were to be the first to tie together the two virtualization technologies KVM and containers (initially OpenVZ) on a single platform and made them easily manageable via a web-based interface. When starting development of Proxmox VE in 2007, the two Proxmox founders, Dietmar Maurer (CTO) and Martin Maurer (CEO), designed it as a bare-metal install CD containing a highly-tweaked version of Debian GNU/Linux optimized for use as a virtualization server. They used a modified Linux kernel which included all the support needed for KVM and OpenVZ. Shortly after the first public release, the first stable version of Proxmox VE 1.0 was available in 2008 containing new features that enabled users to virtualize demanding Linux and Windows applications workloads, apply live migration, and backup their data with vzdump backups on the GUI.

“It's hard to believe that Proxmox VE is ten years old today, and great to see how popular it has become,” says Martin Maurer, co-founder and CEO at Proxmox. “When we started Proxmox VE there was no management interface on the market for managing KVM or OpenVZ easily. We were, as far as I know, one of the first projects to mash-up support for virtual machines and containers on a central GUI. Proxmox VE was designed to meet that need, and over the years it has added so many more features and scaled to meet the demands of enterprises and users alike who want an open-source platform to easily manage compute, network, and storage.”

Open-source platform to easily manage compute, network, and storage

Today, Proxmox VE is translated into 19 languages and has about 200,000 installed hosts in over 142 countries. The company Proxmox Server Solutions offers subscription-based access to technical customer support and stable repository packages. More than 11,000 customers ranging from mid-market to large enterprises, non-profits, and home users have an active subscription. Plans are ranging between 75 and 800 Euros per CPU and year, and provide access to technical support and the stable enterprise-repository that delivers heavily tested and validated packages.
The ten-year-old open-source project Proxmox VE, licensed under the free/open-source license GNU Affero GPL, v3, offers regular releases and continuing development, and has become the open-source alternative to proprietary solutions for data center virtualization or for complex cloud management solutions.

“Proxmox VE has grown into a powerful enterprise virtualization management platform that allows our users to easily manage their whole virtualized infrastructure,” says Martin Maurer. “We look back on the past ten years of Proxmox VE and we are grateful to everyone who made the project a success: our users, customers, and partners that are constantly supporting and pushing us with feedback and new feature requests. Most importantly, we are thankful for our fantastic team and all of their hard work and their input. The architectural design of our platform and the open-source development model allows us to constantly adapt to newest technologies and adjust Proxmox VE to the growing IT demands of our community. For our next version, Proxmox VE 5.2 we have for example Cloudinit on the roadmap which we hope will make a lot of our users happy.”

Ten Milestones Proxmox VETimeline Proxmox VE 2008 2018 sm

  1. Proxmox VE version 0.9 released in April 15, 2008: a web-based GUI for easily managing OpenVZ and KVM.
  2. Proxmox VE 2.0 brings a REST API, a Corosync cluster stack, Backup/Restore via GUI, live snapshots, and a new GUI framework. License change from GPL, v2 to AGPL, v3.
  3. KVM backup implementation.
  4. New Enterprise-Repository and training service are introduced in 2013.
  5. Including ZFS storage plugin and Ceph storage server in 2014.
  6. Proxmox VE 4.0: LXC replaces OpenVZ as container technology. New HA Manager.
  7. GUI update to Sencha Ext JS 6 in 2016.
  8. Proxmox VE 5.0 introduces a new open-source storage replication feature.
  9. Ceph Luminous LTS is included in Proxmox VE 5.1 allowing to build fully hyper-converged infrastructures.
  10. Proxmox VE is 10-years old, and is translated in 19 languages, has 200,000 host installations in 142 countries, 11,000 customers, and 41,000 active members in the community support forum.
Download: Timeline Proxmox VE 2008-2018
Further information:

About Proxmox Virtual Environment
Proxmox VE is the leading open-source platform for all-inclusive enterprise virtualization. With the central built-in web interface you can easily run VMs and containers, manage software-defined storage and networking functionality, high-availability clustering, and multiple integrated out-of-the-box tools like backup/restore, live migration, replication, and the firewall. Enterprises use the powerful yet easy-to-manage all-in-one solution Proxmox VE to meet the core requirements—less complexity, more elasticity— of today’s modern data centers ensuring to stay adaptable for future growth thanks to the flexible, modular and open architecture.

About Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH
Proxmox is a provider of powerful yet easy-to-use open-source server software. Enterprises regardless of size, sector or industry use the stable, secure, scalable, and open Proxmox solutions to deploy efficient, agile and simplified IT infrastructures, minimize total cost of ownership, and avoid vendor lock-in. Proxmox also offers commercial support and training to ensure business continuity to its customers. Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH was established in 2005 and is headquartered in Vienna, Austria.

Contact: Daniela Häsler, Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH