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ESXi or Proxmox
Hello fellow members. I have been doing a lot of reading about both ESXi and Proxmox. They both offer free versions and I am about to take the plunge and pickup a Kimsufi LEB soon. I will only have 1 public ip address, now my question is would I need a layer 3 VM such as pfsense of some sort to do the nat'ing? I would hate to waste system resources on a layer 3 VM if it is not needed. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Comments
Esxi in my opinion is getting worse for free users. I've always thought you need atleast two ips for esxi too. May be wrong though.
ESXi is an excellent virtualization platform. Incredibly flexible, especially when you get into their high-end vCenters, etc.
However, since you only have one public IP you're not going to be able to have any public-facing VMs. ESXi requires a management IP. If you can get a few IPs I would recommend ESXi. Having said that, I've never used Proxmox, so I can't make a fair counter-argument for it.
ESXi is a wonderful platform, but there moving to vCenter and that's not free. Nested virtualization for example require vCenter.
Proxmox works great, would recommend it
Would I be able to run multiple VMs in Proxmox with one public IP? If so, would I need to run a layer 3 VM such as pfsense within Proxmox?
Seems to be a few tutorials online for it.
how about you install it and follow the docs on a virtual machine at digitalocean or vultr. really simple.
Sure, but the real question is can you run the VM's and communicate to the outside world, and the answer is no, each VM requires a public IP if you require it to have public access. A HE tunnel broker allotment of IPv6 would fit the bill.
You can run esxi with public VMs and one ip but it's rather hacky
Might be useful in the future:
http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/33347/install-configure-proxmox-ve-for-nat-ipv4-vps-on-debian-wheezy-e-g-on-online-net
https://vpsaddicted.com/install-and-configure-proxmox-ve-for-nat-ipv4-vps-on-debian-wheezy/
Not difficult to configure a NAT setup with port forwarding. I've got a hack-y NAT setup for Proxmox running on a couple boxes, but they're definitely playgrounds/wouldn't use them for important stuff.
that is not the case.
Would suggest ProxMox as well. Currently running a 2-server setup at my house, for production use. Great software in my opinion. And yes, you can run the VMs behind one outgoing facing IP. As others have stated, just need to setup a NAT then port forward.
Whether you use Promox or VMware ESXi, the backend networking is still going to the same. Both platforms require a management IP.
To be clear, you do not need vCenter to run an ESXI host. You need vCenter when you are connecting more than 1 ESXi physical host together to give you the High Availability and to move VMs from host to host. It does not sound like you will be doing that so VMWare ESXi may be a fine fit for you.