I never ran ESXi in production

Most "why Proxmox" content in 2025-2026 is a migration story driven by Broadcom's ESXi pricing changes. The author had a working VMware stack and got priced out. I'm not that author. I evaluated both, picked Proxmox in 2024, and built on it without ever running ESXi in production. Two years in, I'd make the same call. It reads as either incompetent or contrarian until the rest of the post lands. Here's the reasoning. The three reasons it was the easy call 1. LXC and KVM in one host Most workloads in this homelab are LXCs. Pi-hole, Vaultwarden, Authelia, Traefik, the monitoring stack, GitLab CE itself, all containers sharing the host kernel. A few things need full VM isolation (the NAS guest, Proxmox Backup Server, the Home Assistant OS appliance). Same hypervisor, same CLI, same web UI for both shapes of workload. The alternative is ESXi for the VMs and a separate toolchain (containerd, Docker, Kubernetes, take your pick) for the containers. That's two backup pipelines, two HA stories, two places for config drift to surprise you at 2 AM. pct exec 254 systemctl status authelia and qm start 189 are the same shape. New hires don't have to learn one tool for containers and a different one for VMs. 2. Proxmox Backup Server beats the free Veeam alternative Chunk-level deduplication. Backups across guests and across time share storage. A nightly backup of all 11 LXCs and 2 VMs runs in about ten minutes and adds a few hundred MB of new chunks, because most of the content is the same as yesterday. Cluster-scheduled. One job definition runs across every node in the cluster. No per-node cron, no manual rotation when a node moves. Restore to a different storage class. A backup taken from local-lvm on the G7 restores onto ZFS on a G5 cluster node without conversion gymnastics. Veeam Community Edition is the free comparison. It works. It also caps repository size, doesn't dedup at the chunk level, and lacks the cluster-aware scheduling that makes PBS feel like a built-in feature