For many who have been evaluating the market to settle on their hypervisor of choice for the enterprise moving forward since the Broadcom VMware meltdown, there have been several vendors who are naturally on the table, like Nutanix. However, for those who wanted something refreshing, new, and considerably cheaper than what was offered by the big vendors, Proxmox VE Server has been the natural choice. There has been one major thing though holding it back over these past couple of years, and that is support. Since its inception as a company, Proxmox has only offered support Monday through Friday in business hours. You could pick a third party support option, but today things have changed. Proxmox has announced Proxmox 24/7 enterprise support as part of their offering.
Proxmox finally gets true 24/7 vendor support
This is a pretty straightforward headline but one that is exciting nonetheless. Starting October 19th, Proxmox enterprise support will operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with access to Proxmox enterprise engineers across the various time zones.
You can read the official forum post here: Proxmox announces global 24/7 enterprise support.
The coverage for this new support arrangement applies to more than just PVE. It covers Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE), Proxmox Backup Server (PBS), and Proxmox Datacenter Manager (PDM). This support offering is also good for offline updates and issues there. Activation support can also be handled through the new support arrangement.
Proxmox Premium subscribers will get access to the new 24/7 coverage from day one of their agreement. They will get the following:
- Unlimited support tickets
- Two-hour prioritized response
- SLA backed escalation workflows
The Standard support customers are going to gain access to the new 24/7 support later this year during Q4 2026. Then, Basic support keeps its existing SLA. But it looks like the Basic customers will see additional improvements here as Proxmox is saying this should lower the time to resolution outside of Austrian business hours. The details here are the exciting part for enterprise customers.
Don’t confuse HA with support
Yes we can build really resilient Proxmox clusters with HA built in and have really good SLAs for keeping the business running. But, keep in mind that none of the HA mechanisms are in play if you have a software issue that you need to have worked out with a support engineer.
I have been in the industry for quite some time. Regardless of how good the software product is, there are always edge cases and scenarios that crop up that did not get tested or fleshed out when validating a new release. Sometimes, you need engineers who understand the software from the ground up who know how to troubleshoot across all layers of the stack to help you pinpoint in on the issue.
Calling the actual vendor is different from calling a partner
I have had discussions with many in various circles that I am in and many have been considering once they fully make the switch over to Proxmox to go with a qualified partner in the Proxmox ecosystem. And this is a great solution as many of the vendor partners are really skilled and know what they are doing. But, there is just still a difference with being able to call a partner vs calling the actuall vendor who has access to high level engineering and even development.
Large orgs really care about vendor support and gives a comfort level that you have that relationship with the actual vendor and, importantly, have access to them 24/7/365. This is what the Proxmox COO Tim Marx said about the change in their support structure saying:
…customers across cloud, healthcare, government, education, and finance have consistently requested direct, around-the-clock vendor support. Proxmox’s position is that providing it removes one of the remaining reasons organizations hesitate to put open-source infrastructure at the center of production environments.
I think that is exactly the right way to look at this and kudos to Proxmox for making it happen.
North American base of operations
Also, one of the details of this announcement that I think is especially important for many customers is that Proxmox launching Proxmox North America Inc, is intended to provide a local presence for customers in the U.S. and Canada. According to the news, the North American organization will handle all the sales and account management and technical support during business hours across Eastern through Pacific time zones.
Proxmox is not a small virtualization project anymore
I think the writing on the wall with this announcement is this. Proxmox can no longer be dismissed as something just used by home lab enthusiasts, hosting providers, or small time shops. Proxmox has seen gigantic growth and they now have an install base of 2.3 million Proxmox VE servers around the world. The company also has 60,000 enterprise support plans and that is growing along with 3000 integration partners. Those numbers are not insignificant.
Also, they haven’t just made progress on the business side, but also the technical that I cover way more often. When we look back at really just recent developments, we see things like:
- Proxmox VE 9.2 introduced dynamic load balancing
- Proxmox Datacenter Manager continues to get better
- The company announced official Arm64 support in August 2026
Also, they have made several announcements around enterprise storage, backup solutions, monitoring, AI infrastructure, and other areas. They are now supported by many enterprise backup solutions, including Veeam, and NAKIVO among others.
So, I think the enterprise momentum is definitely in their favor and if they play their cards right and continue to answer the needs of customers around the world migrating away from Broadcom and VMware, their success will be very likely.
This changes the VMware alternative conversation
I know many customers I have talked to who are currently on VMware vSphere have been in a quandary about Proxmox. They love it as a solution. But, the fact that it has had no 24/7/365 support has been a deal breaker up to this point.
This announcement I think will definitely change the story here and position Proxmox as perhaps the strongest customer for enterprise customers leaving VMware. Before when companies were worried if they migrated to Proxmox and had a breaking issue at 3:00 a.m. in the morning and didn’t know who they would call, this is now answered by the announcement.
For customers who needed to have hand holding in trying to manage their 20 clusters they are getting moved over to Promxox, now have a resource for help if they need that help during the process or they run into certain issues.
Does this solve all gaps currently for the enterprise?
This is a great announcement and the right one to hear from Proxmox if it is serious about going after the mainstream enterprise market which obviously it is now that we have heard the news. But, there are definitely still a few gaps with things that we will still need to see some growth in. What are those?
Up until today, 24/7/365 support was definitely a major issue for enterprise customers moving forward with Proxmox. There are still a couple of areas that are lagging behind and those are centralized management and vendor integrations. These are definitely both improving. Proxmox Datacenter Manager is getting new features and maturing. Then also vendors and other solutions are adding native Proxmox support to their offering.
But, they still both have a ways to go. PDM is still in its infancy to be honest and still needs to add a lot of native features before I see enterprises really pivoting over to PDM for their management tool of choice with Proxmox VE Server.
Home lab users should care about this
You may wonder why we would even bring this up. most people in a home lab working with Proxmox don’t need or want something like 24/7 vendor support. But, here is why I think this matters to home lab users. This announcement will definitely help to drive enterprise adoption and this usually creates the momentum for even better management tools and more investment into the product as a whole.
I think this is also going to make Proxmox VE Server experience a very appealing skill to have in the enterprise datacenter now that its adoption is going to be assured. So, this makes it even more valuable to continue to develop your Proxmox VE Server skillset in your home lab. If more organizations seriously evaluate Proxmox as a VMware alternative, having a good feel and handle on clustering, Ceph, Proxmox Backup Server, SDN, HA, Datacenter Manager, storage design, and migration is going to be a super useful skill.
Wrapping up
I have been watching Proxmox closely over the past several years and have been seeing it hit certain milestones in its journey. At a certain point people wondered if an open-source virtualization platform could really provide enough features and capabilities to compete with a commercial hypervisor. Proxmox has shown it can do that. Now the question nis whether it can build out all of the business Lego pieces around it that makes it appealing to enterprise organizations. For us working in the enterprise daily and running home labs, these announcements may not be as exciting as new features like dynamic load balancing or new SDN features, but in a large enterprise environment, and for those customers, these kinds of things matter just as much. I think the tide is shifting now, and we are starting to see the rise of PVE.
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