Why many organisations are using Proxmox to avoid vendor lock-in

25 Feb 2026, by Slade Baylis

With the costs of all cloud infrastructure seemingly going through the roof, and getting more expensive month after month, it’s no surprise that businesses all over the world are looking for alternatives.  From the acquisition of VMware and their subsequent dramatic price increases, to the cost of cloud systems with all the other major hyperscalers increasing month-on-month - businesses are hurting and reconsidering how they’ve implemented their systems.

Just last month we talked on this trend and looked to introduce our readers to our mCloud platform, which is an alternative to the hyperscalers and offers enterprise-grade functionality, resiliency, and performance at a fraction of their cost.  However, for some, being burned by these large hyperscalers like AWS and Azure – or other proprietary solutions like VMware – has left them wanting to build their own private cloud infrastructure instead.  For these teams, one of the stand-out options they’ve been landing on is Proxmox.

Here at Micron21, we’re a holistic provider, which means we support a wide range of different platforms for our clients, including those running Proxmox for their own private clouds.  That’s why this month we thought we’d talk about Proxmox.   We’ll be discussing what it is, what it offers, when to use it and when to look at something else.  We’ll be covering all of this with the aim of empowering you to know whether it’s the right choice your current needs.

What is Proxmox?

Proxmox is a complete open-source virtualisation platform, which comes with enterprise-grade features comparable to the hyperscalers.  It utilises KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) to allow you to run multiple virtual machines in parallel on the same underlying hardware, as well as LXC (Linux Containers) for those looking to run multiple isolated containers at the hypervisor level directly.

For many, one of the most appealing features includes the ability to configure High-Availability (HA) clusters, allowing you to create private cloud solutions that are resilient against downtime caused by hardware-failure.   It’s understandable that this is a highly sought-after feature, as it also allows IT administrators to create their own cloud infrastructure that is just as resilient – and often more so – than the systems they were migrated from.

Some other features of Proxmox include:

• Software-Defined Networking (SDN) – to allow you to manage your networking remotely.
• Hypervisor Integrated Backups – to allow for live-restoring VMs or for individual file-level restores.
• CLI & API Support – to allow for integration with third party management tools.
• Clustered File System – support for a database-driven file system called the Proxmox Cluster File System (pmxcfs), developed by Proxmox.
• Web-based Management Portal & Mobile App – for management of your infrastructure from a browser from their built-in GUI, or from your mobile via an Android app.

With people having been burned by proprietary solutions, the open-source approach is one that’s starting to appeal to many.  Solutions that are proprietary – which is to say, created and owned by a single provider – lock you into that provider. The term for this is “vendor lock-in” and it’s something that companies are starting to try and avoid. 

For example, with the acquisition of VMware and their subsequent licencing restructure and price increase, many were left stuck.  They were left having to choose between either accepting a doubling, tripling, or sometimes even greater increases to their cloud costs, or alternatively having to recreate and migrate all of their infrastructure onto alternative platforms. 

It’s for these reasons that many organisations are either looking to or have already started to use open-source hypervisors – which is the term for the types of software that allows you to create, run, and manage virtual machines.  This is because open-source hypervisors allow them to avoid the dependence on and lock-in with the developers of that software.  However, it’s not just proprietary solutions like VMware that people are starting to avoid, but also lock-ins with their cloud providers more generally.

The “soft” vendor lock-in of specialised knowledge requirements

When it comes to talking about lock-in with particular vendors, this can come in very obvious forms and also more subtle forms.  At a high-level, “lock-in” can just be thought of as how difficult it would be to move to another provider should you need to in the future.  These can be very obvious and tangible things, such as the integration of your application with a DBaaS (Database as a Service) platform from a cloud provider, which requires you to use very specific API calls to interact with it.  However, on the more subtle side, even the learning and knowledge that will be required to use a platform can be a deterrent for an organisation to move to any alternatives.

Each of the big cloud providers offer a wide range of different services and platforms, each with their own individual service names that are unique to just their platform.  With each of these services, specialised knowledge is required to know how to configure and use each of them.  Learning all these different services and offerings is often a skillset in-of-itself, taking a large amount of time to learn and master.  This is just multiplied out by each of the different big cloud providers – such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud – deepening your investment of time and money into each of them.

Put simply, often, the more you learn, use, and integrate your infrastructure with these systems, the more you are locked in and unable to move without a monolithic amount of effort.  At the very least, the sunk cost fallacy – the cognitive bias that leads people to continue investing in a previously made (and no longer ideal) solution due to the investments they’ve already made – can lead you to avoid considering better alternatives.

At least on the integration side, this is a known problem that many have tried to isolate themselves from. Towards this end, they have developed systems and services that try to abstract away from vendor-specific technologies, allowing you to integrated your systems with those services in a provider agnostic way.  This makes your systems more portable, as you’re able to switch between providers without requiring dramatic and time-intensive reconfigurations of your systems.

However, it must be said, why would you even want to use platforms that actively try to lock you in - against your best interests - due to it being in their own financial best interests to do that?

With open-source  options, if you become dissatisfied with your provider, if they become too expensive, or if you just want to move for any number of reasons, you’re able to shift without needing to reimplement anything.  All of your automation can continue to function, your CI/CD pipelines are able to continue working, you are able to just lift and shift your environment into another providers infrastructure.

With Proxmox that’s even more true, as its most often deployed onto hardware that you yourself own, so you’re able to literally relocate that hardware into a new premise without almost any reconfiguration being required.  Even in cases where you’re leasing hardware, migrating away is simply a process of acquiring new servers with another provider, deploying a new Proxmox environment on that hardware, and then migrating your virtual machines and containers across.

With this sort of approach, it’s simply not possible to be as locked in, as it is with other public cloud approaches.  This is why many are looking at Proxmox as a solution to their vendor lock-in problems.

Have any questions about deploying your own Proxmox environment?

If you have any questions about deploying your own private cloud infrastructure, let us know!  We’re a holistic data centre, providing IT infrastructure solutions of all types and all sizes of businesses, and we can help you no matter what stage you’re at.

You can contact us via phone on 1300 769 972 (Option #1) or via email at sales@micron21.com