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GEN have run Proxmox in production in our own UK data centres since 2015, and supported it for enterprise customers for just as long. The engineers who keep that estate running are the same engineers who take your call, on service level agreements ranging from 4 hours during business hours right through to 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, every day of the year.
GEN have been in enterprise IT for 37 years, and a reputation for being the best at it is the only marketing we have ever needed. We hold no partner status, no reseller margin and no vendor incentive, with Proxmox or with anyone else, so the advice you get is genuinely independent. There is no contract either: you buy hours, you use hours, and you stay because the support is worth paying for.
Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE or PVE) is an open-source virtualisation platform designed for managing hyper-converged infrastructure. It's a powerful solution that combines two key virtualisation technologies: Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) with QEMU hardware emulation for full virtualisation of virtual machines and Linux Containers (LXC) for lightweight containerisation, all hosted on Debian Linux.
See Our Proxmox Virtualisation Services for GEN Cloud, Edge and Converged Virtualisation. To discuss support options, connect with our team below. If your issue is more urgent, head over to the HelpDesk and raise a case for Proxmox technical support.
GEN hold no software partner badge, for Proxmox or for anyone else. Hardware is a different matter, and we hold plenty of those, because an accreditation with the likes of HPE brings parts, firmware and escalation routes that a customer genuinely benefits from. A software partner badge brings none of that. It is a commercial arrangement with a fee attached, a margin on licences and a target to hit, and it turns the product into something the badge holder now has a financial interest in recommending.
If you value Proxmox, support it directly. Buy a subscription or make a donation to Proxmox Server Solutions and the money reaches the people writing the code, which is what keeps the platform healthy. A margin paid to a partner funds the partner.
Our reputation is protected the way enterprise customers want and rarely get: a bulletproof, bidirectional NDA. Section 5 of our Framework Agreement makes the relationship itself confidential in both directions, along with your sites, your people and your infrastructure, and it survives the end of the agreement. This page names no customers, which equally means we will never be naming you. For anyone whose infrastructure is genuinely sensitive, that is the right way round.
If you're looking to move to Proxmox from VMware or Hyper-V, we have the experience and the resources to assist at every stage of the migration, from initial planning through to fine tuning once you're live. Across 2021 and 2022, through the VMware exodus that followed the licensing changes, GEN engineers migrated 3,900 nodes from ESXi to Proxmox. Estates of every size, from a single host to multi-site clusters, and we have been doing it ever since.
Most migration pain arrives after the virtual machines have transferred. We deal with the post-transfer issues in networking, disks and storage across both Windows and Linux guests, so your transfer succeeds the first time and with the minimum of downtime.
Migration work can be delivered as a project, or rolled into an ongoing support or maintenance agreement so the same team that moves you onto Proxmox carries on running it. Full detail is on our VMware to Proxmox migration page.
Independence is only worth anything if you can act on it. Proxmox is not the only hypervisor we support, and that is precisely what makes our advice on it worth having. GEN engineers work across VMware vSphere and ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, XCP-ng, HPE VM Essentials and bare metal KVM/QEMU, as well as Proxmox VE and Proxmox Backup Server. A provider whose only competence is Proxmox has only one recommendation available to it, whatever your requirement turns out to be.
That breadth is what lets our engineers tell you where Proxmox is the right fit, where another platform serves you better, and where a mixed estate is the honest answer. Most of our customers run at least two of these side by side, and we support the result as one estate either way.
GEN offer a comprehensive portfolio of enterprise support services for the Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE), including pay-per-use support, hybrid support, on-site support and emergency support, all provided in-house by GEN's technical teams.
We also offer training and development services to extend the solutions. Maintenance agreements provide a fixed cost solution for hybrid or fully managed outsourcing, and SLA levels can be mixed and matched across your virtualisation infrastructure, so the cluster carrying your production workloads is covered by our 30 minute SLA while a development node sits on something lighter.
Every enterprise fault we take on runs through the same four steps. Capture what is broken before it changes, work out what actually caused it, plan the fix with its consequences considered, then carry it out. The temptation under pressure is to start typing, and that is how a one hour outage becomes a three day one. It is also the difference between an engineer and somebody with root.
Before anything is touched we capture the state: logs, configuration, cluster and quorum status, storage and Ceph health, guest detail and metrics. Our diagnostic scripts do it in a single command. A fault investigated after somebody has started changing things may never be explained at all.
We establish the actual cause, not the first plausible one. That means reading the evidence properly, following it into the source code where the logs stop short, and accounting for the edge cases that make a fault intermittent rather than constant.
The fix is decided before it is carried out, with its consequences worked through: what it touches, what it restarts, and what it puts at risk. Where data could be affected, taking a snapshot, clone or copy of whatever the fix might break is part of the plan, not an afterthought.
The plan is executed in an agreed window by an engineer who knows what every step is for, with the fallback already in place, and with you informed as it happens rather than after the event.
Afterwards comes the PIR, our post incident report: what failed, what was found, what was done about it and what will stop it happening again, fed back into our diagnostics, our monitoring and the knowledge base. It does not fit the acronym, and it is not optional.
There is no support contract to sign, no minimum term, and no notice period. You buy hours at our published rates, you use them when you need them, and nothing obliges you to keep buying them. Once you are onboarded the route to an engineer is open the day you need it, whether that is next week or in two years' time.
The industry norm is a multi-year agreement in which somebody has already calculated how many hours you are likely to use, added a margin, and built in the clauses that make leaving expensive. We have never worked that way. If you want a fixed annual cost we will happily put you on a maintenance agreement, but that is your choice to make on commercial grounds, not a condition of being supported.
The reason is straightforward. A contract that holds a customer in place removes the only real pressure on a support provider to stay good at its job. We would rather keep the pressure on.
Any competent provider can log into a Proxmox cluster and fix what's broken. These are the things we have built around the platform since 2015, and they arrive with the support whether you are on an SLA or paying by the hour.
Our Oversight infrastructure monitor is a deep dive Proxmox monitoring solution for clusters, assessing guest and host utilisation, disk space, disk performance, IO queue, network activity and much more. Data is logged over time so our engineers can assess trends and predict issues, while triggers and conditions raise events on our system and automatically allocate an engineer to resolve them.
Cluster-wide Proxmox notifications are sent to our API webhook, where our systems analyse them for indicators of problems, failures, warnings and operational exceptions. Failed backups, replication or sync issues, migration problems, clone failures and other job anomalies are assessed automatically and, where needed, converted into HelpDesk tickets for engineering review. Nobody has to sit and watch every backup run.
We maintain an extensive suite of diagnostic scripts written specifically for Proxmox, and developed over a decade of resolving real faults. A single command on the affected node collects, curates and submits the evidence straight to the HelpDesk, so the engineer picks up a case already holding system state, cluster and quorum status, storage and Ceph health, networking, guest configuration and the relevant logs. Nobody wastes the first hour of an outage asking you to paste command output. Fault-finding starts from a complete picture, and time-to-fix drops accordingly. This is the single largest reason our response times hold up in practice as well as on paper.
Synchronise your Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) backups to GEN's data centres for high availability offsite storage and our Cloud restore, taking your PBS backup in a crisis and building a cloud hosted instance of your VM or CT in minutes. We can sync daily, bi-daily, hourly or continuously, with flexible retention and prune, so there is always a secure offsite copy of your critical virtual machines and containers.
A stock Proxmox installation covers the common cases, and estates rarely stay common for long. We build and support the configurations the installer will not give you: GFS2 and other clustered filesystems, SMB and CIFS backed storage, unusual iSCSI, NFS and multipath arrangements, non-standard network and SDN topologies, custom hook scripts, kernel and driver work for older or awkward hardware, and integration with storage and backup platforms Proxmox has no native support for. If it can be made to work we will tell you honestly whether it should be, and then make it work.
A decade of Proxmox problems, and their solutions, written down. Our technical knowledge base is curated by the engineers who resolved the cases, not copied from upstream documentation, and it covers the awkward real-world scenarios that the manual doesn't: storage that won't mount, quorum that won't form, migrations that stall. Command cheat-sheets, checklists and configuration references are available alongside it from our customer downloads area.
GEN runs its own in-house development team, and a great deal of what it writes sits on top of Proxmox. Very few support providers can say that, and it is the difference between a provider who can configure your cluster and one who can automate it.
We work directly against the Proxmox REST API rather than around it, so anything the web interface can do can be driven programmatically, and a good deal that it cannot. Ansible playbooks handle configuration, patching and repeatable operational tasks across a whole cluster. Terraform provisions virtual machines, containers, storage and networking as code, with cloud-init templates behind it, so an environment is described in a repository rather than assembled by hand.
On top of that we write shell and Perl against the node itself, middleware connecting Proxmox to the systems your business already runs, and monitoring pipelines feeding our own response tooling. It is the same framework we use to run our own estate, and we will build on it for yours, or hand it over and train your team to run it.
Proxmox VE's clustering capabilities allow you to configure high availability across multiple nodes and locations. GEN provide dedicated Proxmox VE nodes in our data centres that you can join to your existing clusters, giving you off-site replication, failover and high availability even when you only have one site.
This doesn't need expensive private circuits or SD-WAN. Many of our customers run hybrid clusters successfully over business grade broadband, though for high traffic clusters, and especially with Ceph, a dedicated connection is recommended.
Proxmox fits equally well into small business deployments and large scale enterprise estates. It works on-premise for localised virtualisation, across wide area deployments with clusters, and in hybrid or hyper-converged environments mixing cloud and on-premise for maximum flexibility.
The same support, monitoring and tooling applies at either end of that range. A three node cluster in one office gets the diagnostic scripts, the knowledge base and the 24/7 engineers, exactly as a multi-site estate does, and on exactly the same terms.
We offer structured Proxmox training across three levels. Level 1 is an introduction to Proxmox concepts and basic day-to-day operation, Level 2 covers management, operational procedures and recovery, and Level 3 moves into advanced diagnostics and configuration. Specialist courses go further into Proxmox storage subsystems including LVM, NFS, iSCSI and Ceph, and into Proxmox networking and software-defined networking (SDN).
Beyond Level 3 we teach Proxmox at source code level, and as far as we are aware nobody else in the UK does. Because the platform is open, we can take an engineering team past the administration guide and into what the code actually does: how the cluster filesystem and the Corosync layer behave when a node drops, what a given daemon does on the way to the error message you are looking at, where the perl and C boundaries sit, how the REST API is implemented underneath the web interface, and how to read the upstream repository to establish whether a behaviour is a bug or a design decision. Teams that have sat through it stop guessing at faults, and the calls they do raise with us arrive already diagnosed. No proprietary hypervisor can be taught this way at any price.
We build each course around your operational needs. Some teams only need day-to-day operations training, while others need deeper focus on storage or networking, so we can tailor the content and course structure to suit your environment. Courses are delivered remotely or on-site across the UK, and full details are on our Proxmox training courses page.
Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) offers several benefits as an open-source virtualisation platform compared to proprietary solutions such as VMware or Hyper-V.
Proxmox is free to use, with optional paid support available. This significantly reduces licensing costs compared to VMware's expensive subscription-based model or Hyper-V's potential licensing fees, and removes much of the financial risk with scaleability.
As an open-source solution, Proxmox allows organisations to modify and adapt the platform to their specific needs, and based on Debian Linux allows limitless customisations. This flexibility is not available with closed-source alternatives.
Being based on the KVM hypervisor and LXC containerisation platform, Proxmox doesn't lock you into their solution. You can easily move your virtual machines to any other KVM based system, and can easily migrate virtual machines to other platforms.
Proxmox benefits from a very active community that contributes to its testing and development, and provides peer support to testers, which leads to faster bug fixes and feature improvements. Proxmox has always been very receptive to community feedback and requests, ensuring the platform is always moving forward.
Proxmox support, even fully managed from GEN, is very competitive and significantly less than comparable support from VMware or Microsoft. With an open source platform GEN have far better access to technical data and source code, allowing us to resolve issues far quicker. Over many years of supporting Proxmox we've developed an entire catalogue of our own tools to diagnose, manage and troubleshoot issues.
Despite being open-source, Proxmox offers a robust set of features including support for both virtual machines and containers, high availability clustering, and integrated backup tools. The extensive API allows custom solutions to be easily constructed around the platform.
Proprietary systems like VMware and Hyper-V are quick to lose support for older hardware, and to mandate minimum hardware requirements that are sometimes out of reach for small business. Proxmox, KVM and LXC will function on a far wider range of hardware, and fully support vendors like HPE from G8 right through to G11.
Proxmox, Debian and server infrastructure from the likes of HPE can result in lower power consumption and energy savings, which as you know is an important consideration in today's landscape.
GEN provide enterprise Proxmox support across the UK, with a 30 minute SLA available 24 hours a day, every day of the year. GEN have run Proxmox in production in their own UK data centres since 2015, and have been in enterprise IT for 37 years. Support is delivered by in-house UK engineers with no outsourced first line.
No. GEN's support is independent of any Proxmox subscription, and GEN hold no software partner status with Proxmox or with any other vendor. A subscription buys the enterprise repository and support from Proxmox Server Solutions themselves, which is well worth paying for if you value the project, but it is not a condition of being supported by GEN.
GEN's fastest service level puts an engineer on a critical fault within 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Service levels run from 4 hours during business hours up to that 30 minute response, and different levels can be applied to different parts of the same estate.
Yes. Across 2021 and 2022 GEN engineers migrated 3,900 nodes from ESXi to Proxmox, and have carried on doing that work since. A migration covers planning and sizing, storage and network design, virtual machine conversion, guest driver and boot work on Windows and Linux, cutover scheduling, post-migration tuning and operational training.
No. There is no support contract, no minimum term and no notice period. Customers buy hours at published rates and use them as they are needed. A fixed cost maintenance agreement is available for anyone who prefers a predictable annual figure, but it is optional.
Yes, and GEN run their own data centre estate on it. Proxmox VE provides high availability clustering, live migration, Ceph and ZFS storage, software defined networking and integrated backup through Proxmox Backup Server. It is not the right answer for every workload, and GEN will say so where another platform fits better.
Yes. GEN engineers support VMware vSphere and ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, XCP-ng, HPE VM Essentials and bare metal KVM/QEMU alongside Proxmox VE and Proxmox Backup Server, including mixed estates running several of these platforms at once.
Yes. GEN deliver structured Proxmox training at three levels, from day to day operation through to advanced diagnostics, with specialist courses in storage covering LVM, NFS, iSCSI and Ceph, and in networking including SDN. Training can go down to source code level. Courses are delivered remotely or on site across the UK.
GEN have one objective, and it is not to be the biggest or the cheapest. Everything on this page follows from it: Proxmox in production since 2015, a 30 minute response at any hour of any day, the SAPR method applied to every fault, diagnostics we wrote ourselves because the standard tools were not enough, training that goes down to the source code, customisation and automation well past the default build, genuine competence across every other hypervisor worth naming, and no contract holding any of it together.
Whether you need a second pair of hands on an existing cluster, a full migration from VMware or Hyper-V, or 24/7 cover for production virtualisation, our team can scope it with you. For anything urgent, raise a case on the HelpDesk and an engineer will pick it up.
