Proxmox vs Kubernetes in 2025: understanding the differences and similarities

In the ever-evolving world of IT infrastructure, two key technologies have become cornerstones of modern computing: virtualization and containerization. These innovations have revolutionized how organizations deploy, manage, and scale their workloads, establishing themselves as industry standards for operating infrastructure. Today, it is rare to find a data center operator not leveraging virtualization, and by 2025, most companies have either adopted or are planning to adopt containerization.

At the forefront of these paradigms are two powerful tools: Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) and Kubernetes. Proxmox specializes in virtualization management, providing a comprehensive platform for deploying and managing virtual machines and LXC containers. Kubernetes, on the other hand, is the leading orchestration platform for containerized applications, offering advanced features for scaling, managing, and automating container workloads.

With the growing interest in open-source software and the widespread adoption of cloud-native technologies and hybrid infrastructures, the comparison between Proxmox and Kubernetes has become a hot topic. While each serves distinct purposes, their overlapping use cases and capabilities can make it challenging for IT professionals and organizations to choose the most suitable solution for their infrastructure needs.

This blog post explores the core differences and use cases of Proxmox and Kubernetes, providing insights to help you determine when and how to effectively leverage each technology.

Virtualization and containerization

Before diving into the details, let’s first clarify what virtualization and containerization mean.

Virtualization enables the creation of virtual machines (VMs), which emulate entire physical computers, allowing multiple operating systems to run on a single physical server. This technology revolutionized resource utilization by decoupling hardware from software and laid the foundation for modern data centers.

Containerization, on the other hand, takes abstraction a step further. Instead of virtualizing entire machines, it isolates applications and their dependencies within lightweight containers. This approach, pioneered in the era of hyperscalers, enables rapid deployments, seamless portability, and effortless scalability.

From the user’s perspective, both containers and virtual machines (VMs) provide isolated environments, resource allocation, and scalability for running applications.

Understanding Proxmox

Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) is a powerful open-source platform designed to simplify and streamline virtualization management. As a comprehensive solution, Proxmox enables users to deploy and manage both virtual machines (VMs) and Linux containers within a single unified interface. Its primary role is to provide a robust and user-friendly environment for virtualization, catering to a wide range of use cases, from small-scale personal projects to enterprise-grade deployments.

One of Proxmox’s standout features is its open-source nature, which makes it a cost-effective choice without sacrificing functionality. It is highly accessible to users, offering a simple web-based interface that eliminates the steep learning curve often associated with other virtualization platforms. This ease of use, combined with extensive documentation and an active community, makes Proxmox an attractive option for beginners and experts alike.

It is built on top of KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) for full virtualization and LXC (Linux Containers) for containerization. Additionally, it includes tools for software-defined storage, allowing users to create and manage high-availability storage solutions using ZFS, Ceph, or other popular storage backends.

Understanding Kubernetes

Kubernetes, often abbreviated as K8s, is a powerful open-source platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Originating at Google in 2013, it was designed to ensure reliable and efficient container deployment at any scale, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. By abstracting the infrastructure, Kubernetes enhances portability, enabling applications to run seamlessly across cloud providers, on-premises servers, or hybrid environments. It ensures containers receive the required CPU, memory, and storage resources, dynamically adjusting the number of application instances based on demand to optimize resource utilization and performance.

Kubernetes excels at managing containerized applications, making it ideal for microservices architectures. It allows developers to deploy, update, and scale individual microservices independently, enabling agility and resilience in application development. With features such as automated rollouts, self-healing, and service discovery, Kubernetes simplifies the management of complex, distributed systems, making it an essential tool for organizations embracing cloud-native practices.

Functional overlap

As Kubernetes and Proxmox VE have matured, they have introduced features that sometimes appear to overlap. For instance, Proxmox supports running containers, while Kubernetes can orchestrate virtual machines through integrations like KubeVirt. This functional convergence can blur the differences between their core purposes, making it challenging to determine when to use each platform. In this section, we will clarify these overlaps and explore their unique roles in modern infrastructure.

Proxmox LXC containers

Proxmox LXC containers are lightweight, OS-level containers designed for virtualizing entire operating systems rather than individual applications. Unlike Docker containers, which are tailored for application containerization with defined ENTRYPOINTS or CMD for running specific tasks, LXC containers focus on providing a complete OS environment. This makes them ideal for scenarios where you need the isolation and manageability of a virtual machine but with the efficiency and lower overhead of containers.

In Proxmox, LXC containers blur the line between VMs and containers; you can manage them similarly to virtual machines, including configuring resources, accessing the console, and running persistent workloads. They are perfect for hosting services that require a full OS or for testing and development environments where lightweight, manageable virtualization is key.

KubeVirt and Kubernetes virtual machines

KubeVirt is an extension of Kubernetes designed to address the needs of development teams managing hybrid workloads that span both containers and virtual machines (VMs). It provides a seamless platform for organizations that have embraced Kubernetes for container orchestration but still rely on legacy VM-based workloads that are impractical to containerize. By integrating virtual machines directly into Kubernetes workflows, KubeVirt enables teams to unify their development and operational processes across containers and VMs.

With KubeVirt, teams can use Kubernetes to orchestrate VMs alongside containers, creating a unified environment for deploying and managing hybrid workloads. This capability is particularly valuable for applications that require interactions between containerized microservices and virtualized components. KubeVirt allows organizations to gradually decompose VM-based applications into microservices while continuing to operate legacy components as needed.

By combining the strengths of Kubernetes and KubeVirt, teams can modernize their infrastructure at their own pace, supporting both new containerized applications and existing virtualized workloads on a single, integrated platform.

Kubernetes vs Proxmox VE: friends or competitors?

Comparing Kubernetes and Proxmox VE directly is not entirely fair, as they serve distinct purposes within the infrastructure ecosystem. Kubernetes shines in the realm of container orchestration, making it more comparable to tools like HashiCorp Nomad or Docker Swarm. Similarly, Proxmox VE specializes in virtualization, placing it in competition with platforms like VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V.

In practice, organizations aiming to adopt modern cloud-native approaches often utilize both containerization and virtualization solutions. Kubernetes, as the de-facto standard for container orchestration, pairs naturally with Proxmox. This combination is common because each tool excels in its domain: virtualization for workloads best suited to virtual machines and containerization for applications like microservices that thrive in Kubernetes environments.

Moreover, the teams interacting with these tools often have distinct roles - system administrators managing virtual machines and developers focusing on containerized applications. This separation of concerns reinforces the complementary nature of these platforms.

Ultimately, Kubernetes and Proxmox are not competitors but allies in modern infrastructure. Running Kubernetes clusters on top of Proxmox is a logical and efficient approach, enabling organizations to harness the strengths of both technologies in a unified and flexible environment.

Deploying Kubernetes on Proxmox

Setting up a Kubernetes control plane on Proxmox requires careful planning and attention to detail. The process begins with preparing VM images and creating the necessary VMs. For a production environment, it is crucial to distribute these VMs across multiple physical servers and, if possible, across different geographical locations. This approach ensures system resilience and minimizes downtime in case of failures.

To make creating VMs easier, you can use tools like Terraform with the Terraform Proxmox Provider. Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that helps automate the creation and management of resources, whether they’re in the cloud or on your local Proxmox setup.

After creating the VMs, the next step is to install the required software, such as a container runtime (like Docker or containerd), and Kubernetes components such as etcd, apiserver, scheduler, and controller-manager. At this stage, you also need to set up TLS certificates to secure communication between the different parts of Kubernetes.

One of the most challenging parts is setting up networking. You’ll need a Container Network Interface (CNI) plugin to allow containers to communicate with each other, enable networking between nodes, and handle traffic coming into the cluster.

The whole setup can be tricky, and we won’t be able to cover everything in detail in this article, but tools like kubeadm or kubespray can help. There are also great guides, such as Khanh Pham’s proxmox-kubernetes GitHub repository and his article Creating a Kubernetes cluster on Proxmox VE with Terraform & Kubespray or Jay LaCroix’s video “How to Build an Awesome Kubernetes Cluster using Proxmox Virtual Environment” on Learn Linux TV.

Finally, you need to plan how to manage the cluster after it’s running. This includes ensuring the control plane and etcd key-value store are always available, setting up backups, and planning how to update the cluster and monitor its performance.

Deploying Kubernetes on Proxmox is a great investment in your infrastructure but requires significant time, expertise, and planning to do it right. Having a good understanding of how Kubernetes and Proxmox work, along with planning for ongoing maintenance, will help make your setup reliable and efficient.

Proxmox Managed Kubernetes with Cloudfleet

The easiest way to install and manage Kubernetes on Proxmox is to avoid doing it yourself. With Cloudfleet Kubernetes Engine (CFKE), you can easily manage hybrid, edge, and on-premises self-managed infrastructure by using Self-Managed Nodes to connect your Proxmox servers to a Kubernetes cluster.

Self-Managed Nodes are Linux machines you set up and provide to CFKE, allowing it to run workloads on your hardware. This approach lets you grow your cluster using your own servers or third-party cloud resources. These nodes fully integrate into the cluster and can handle any workload their hardware supports.

Adding a Proxmox server to your Kubernetes cluster is as simple as running:

cloudfleet clusters add-self-managed-node CLUSTER_ID --region DATACENTER_REGION --zone DATACENTER_ZONE

With this setup, you just need to keep your VMs running - Cloudfleet takes care of managing your Proxmox Kubernetes cluster. If you want to learn more about Self-Managed Nodes, check out the on-premises section of the documentation. For hands-on guidance, check out our step-by-step tutorial Deploy Kubernetes on Proxmox.

Conclusion

Proxmox and Kubernetes each play unique and essential roles in modern IT infrastructure. Proxmox excels at managing virtual machines and containers, while Kubernetes is the go-to solution for orchestrating containerized applications. Together, these technologies are complementary and can be integrated to build powerful, flexible, and scalable systems. By understanding their strengths and use cases, you can choose the right tool - or a combination of both - that best fits your specific needs and infrastructure goals.