Proxmox VE 8.2, released in April 2024, added a built-in importer for VMware ESXi machines, tested by its developers on ESXi 6.5 through 8.0. Live import boots the machine on Proxmox before its whole disk has moved and copies the rest in the background. The ESXi machine must be off, so a short outage remains, but per the Proxmox documentation live import most often cuts a service's total downtime significantly.
Machines we plan separately
| Case | What the Proxmox VE documentation says |
|---|---|
| Disks on vSAN | import does not work, so the disks move to another datastore first |
| Snapshots | import can be significantly slower |
| Encryption with a vTPM | the vTPM state cannot move, so keep the disk decryption keys |
| Several imports at once | the ESXi API can overload and block every running import |
Our order of work
We start with an inventory of machines, disks, networks and service dependencies. Next we remove the old hypervisor's guest tools and record the network setup and DHCP reservations, since a machine on Proxmox gets a new MAC address. The cluster and its backups are running before the first machine moves, and the old environment goes off only after the services pass their tests. Our patches are merged into Proxmox VE, so we know its code from the inside.
Costs
Proxmox VE is open source under the GNU AGPL v3. A subscription with the stable enterprise repository and support runs from EUR 370 a year per CPU socket on Basic to EUR 1,100 on Premium, and core count does not change the price. High availability, live migration and backups work on every tier, and the plans differ only in support.
Our servers and DevOps page covers Proxmox rollouts and migrations from VMware.
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