Hi,
Note that I'm mostly speaking of theoretical limits and that there's currently no available Hardware which can top those, or even come close (besides custom-made super-computer stuff, obviously).
Currently: 8096 logical cores per host are the upper limit, 256 to 512 are rather the upper end of systems out in the wild nowadays.
~ 128 TiBs per node, as we currently use 4-level page tables (5 level would be possible).
Peta to Exabytes, depending on technology used. ZFS and Ceph should be both able to scale quite high here.
How many or how fast? Not sure if anybody run into a "how many" limit, this is normally limited by the count of PCIe lanes you can access on the motherboard. How fast? 100 GBps are working fine, those were used in a benchmark paper from 2020: ( https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-ve-ceph-benchmark-2020-09-hyper-converged-with-nvme.76516/ ). There are 200 and 400 GBps, but they may need some tuning and fitting motherboard/CPU/... to work as advertised.
Do you mean nodes in a cluster? There are clusters with ~50 nodes out in the wild, but one may need good HW and network experience to go for over 16 and especially over 32 Nodes.
But remember, services like Let's Encrypt (ACME) handle all their hundreds of millions of requests with a single server just fine, so with good powerful HW you can go a long way even when "just" having a 3 to 5 node cluster. Bonus: such setups are much less work to manage.
FAQs
Proxmox Staff Member
What is the maximum disk size for Proxmox? ›
For 32-bit CPUs on 2.6 kernels, the maximum LV size is 16TB. For 64-bit CPUs on 2.6 kernels, the maximum LV size is 8EB. (Yes, that is a very large number.) For 2.4 based kernels, the maximum LV size is 2TB.
What is the maximum memory in Proxmox? ›
Memory, minimum 2 GB for OS and Proxmox VE services.
What hardware does Proxmox support? ›
Here are the minimum requirements to install Proxmox on a hardware node: Processor: Intel or AMD 64-bit. Motherboard: Intel VT or AMD-V capable (not required for OpenVZ) Memory: 1 GB RAM.
What is the max RAM for Proxmox VM? ›
Proxmox Staff Member
I see in redhat link that maximum kvm ram can be 4TB or "Supports the maximum supported memory in the host, all of which may be allocated to the virtualized guest. 32-bit guests with Physical Address Extension (PAE) support will only be able to access 64 GB. This is a virtual hardware limitation."
What is the maximum cluster size in proxmox? ›
There's no explicit limit for the number of nodes in a cluster. In practice, the actual possible node count may be limited by the host and network performance. Currently (2021), there are reports of clusters (using high-end enterprise hardware) with over 50 nodes in production.
What is the USB device limit for proxmox? ›
Yes, the limit is 5 in the GUI. People on this forum have had success with up to 9 in the configuration file, but it might requires some manual code changes and/or the GUI might remove those sometimes.
What is the limitation of proxmox? ›
Currently: 8096 logical cores per host are the upper limit, 256 to 512 are rather the upper end of systems out in the wild nowadays. ~ 128 TiBs per node, as we currently use 4-level page tables (5 level would be possible). Peta to Exabytes, depending on technology used.
What is better than proxmox? ›
Other important factors to consider when researching alternatives to Proxmox VE include storage. The best overall Proxmox VE alternative is VMware vSphere. Other similar apps like Proxmox VE are VirtualBox, Azure Virtual Machines, Oracle VM, and Virtuozzo.
What OS to use with proxmox? ›
Proxmox Virtual Environment is based on Debian GNU/Linux and uses a custom Linux Kernel.
Since Proxmox is Debian with a custom Ubuntu kernel, pretty much runs on a 64-bit CPU with Intel VT/AMD-V hardware virtualization. Have it running on Intel Sandy Bridge, Haswell, and Broadwell CPU generations with high CPU core counts with no issues.
How much RAM do I need for Proxmox ZFS? ›
ZFS depends heavily on memory, so you need at least 8GB to start. In practice, use as much as you can get for your hardware/budget. To prevent data corruption, we recommend the use of high quality ECC RAM. If you use a dedicated cache and/or log disk, you should use an enterprise class SSD.
Can Proxmox use GPU? ›
NVIDIA vGPU technology enables multiple virtual machines to use a single supported physical GPU. This article explains how to use NVIDIA vGPU on Proxmox VE. The instructions were tested using an RTX A5000.
What is the maximum MTU for proxmox? ›
you can setup mtu 9000 everywhere on your network (physical switch, proxmox bridge, proxmox nics,....) , and setup 1500 mtu in your vm guest ok, it'll use mtu 1500. (and it'll not be fragmented, because your network accept mtu up to 9000).
What should be the maximum size of virtual memory? ›
Microsoft recommends that you set virtual memory to be no less than 1.5 times and no more than 3 times the amount of RAM on your computer. For power PC owners (like most UE/UC users), you likely have at least 2GB of RAM so your virtual memory can be set up to 6,144 MB (6 GB).
How much disk space does proxmox use? ›
System Requirements
Storage: at least 8 GB free disk space, best setup with redundancy, use hardware RAID controller with battery backed write cache (“BBU”) or ZFS.
What is the maximum disk capacity of a VM? ›
The maximum size of a single disk is 32 TB, and the maximum total size of all disks attached to a VM is 256 TB. Regarding the multipath concept, Azure Shared Disks support multipathing. Multipathing is a technique that allows a server to use multiple physical paths to access a storage device.
What is the maximum swap size in proxmox? ›
Defines the size of the swap volume. The default is the size of the installed memory, minimum 4 GB and maximum 8 GB.
What is the maximum capacity of the default OS disk for your Linux VM? ›
The default virtual hard disk size for the operating system (OS) is typically 30 GB on a Linux VM in Azure. This article covers expanding either OS disks or data disks. You can't expand the size of striped volumes. An OS disk has a maximum capacity of 4,095 GiB.
