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Proxmox is the primary virtualisation platform in GEN's own data centres, and has been for close to 15 years. The engineers who run that estate are the same engineers who support yours, with service level agreements from 4 hours during business hours right through to 1 hour, 24/7.
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.
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. Licensing changes have pushed a lot of organisations to review their virtualisation platform, and we've handled that move for estates ranging from a single host to multi-site clusters.
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.
We keep our virtualisation practice deliberately independent. GEN holds no alignment with any single virtualisation vendor, and none of the commercial obligations that come with one, so nothing we recommend is shaped by a licence target, a reseller margin or a channel commitment.
We run and support Proxmox because fifteen years of using it in our own data centres has shown us exactly what it does well, not because we're required to promote it. When you ask us to look at your environment, we're free to tell you where Proxmox is the right fit, where another platform serves you better, and where a mixed estate is the honest answer. We can support the result either way.
That independence matters just as much after the decision is made. It's what lets our engineers give you a straight answer on where the platform has limits, whether an upgrade is worth the disruption, and which approach will survive contact with your actual workload. Vendor-neutral and platform-independent is a position we've chosen deliberately, and one we intend to keep.
GEN offer a comprehensive portfolio of technical 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 service levels can be mixed and matched across your virtualisation infrastructure, so the cluster carrying your production workloads is covered differently to a development node.
Any competent provider can log into a Proxmox cluster and fix what's broken. These are the things we've built around the platform over the last 15 years that arrive with the support contract.
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 a collection of advanced diagnostic scripts built specifically for Proxmox environments. They collect, curate and submit diagnostic data straight from the node to the HelpDesk, so an engineer opens a case already holding system state, configuration, storage, networking and log detail. Fault-finding starts from a complete picture and time-to-fix drops accordingly.
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.
Fifteen years 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 an in-house development team, and a great deal of what it writes sits on top of Proxmox. Terraform and Proxmox API automation for provisioning and resource management, operational playbooks that turn a recurring task into a repeatable one, custom interfaces and middleware connecting Proxmox to the systems your business already runs, and monitoring pipelines feeding our own response tooling. It's the same framework we use to run our own estate, and we'll build on it for yours.
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.
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).
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 virtualization platform compared to proprietary solutions like 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.
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.
