On 29 April 2005 two Linux developers in Vienna, Dietmar and Martin Maurer, released Proxmox Mail Gateway and registered the GmbH. Three years later came Virtual Environment: OpenVZ + KVM, a browser, Debian. In 2026 Proxmox VE 9.2 (21 May) runs kernel 7.0, QEMU 11 and LXC 7 on Debian 13, the company still belongs to its founders, and 24/7 support starts in October. Two million three hundred thousand hosts. No private equity.
2005: Mail Gateway, then VE
OpenVZ had no backup or GUI. KVM was emerging in the kernel. The Maurers brought the two problems together. 29 April 2005: Proxmox Mail Gateway 1.0 and Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH. 15 April 2008: Proxmox VE 0.9/1.0 — web interface, containers and full machines in the same dashboard, the trick VMware charged for in modules.
The company is Austrian, independent, 100% founder-owned. AGPLv3 starting with VE 2.x (1.x was GPLv2): anyone modifying it and offering it as a service must give back the code. A subscription doesn't unlock features — it unlocks the enterprise repository and SLA.
The stack: KVM, LXC, ZFS, Ceph
Until 3.4 containers used OpenVZ. In 4.0 (6 October 2015) that became LXC: a new kernel, unprivileged by default later on, a new HA Manager. KVM covers Windows and anything needing VT-x/AMD-V. On storage: a ZFS plugin in 2014, Ceph that same year, thick LVM snapshots in 9.0. Corosync clustering, REST API in 2.0, GUI backups, live snapshots. One ISO. One apt. No separate vCenter.
The ecosystem grew alongside VE: Backup Server, Mail Gateway, and in December 2025 the stable Datacenter Manager 1.0 — multiple clusters on one screen. On 5 August 2026 VE for ARM64 arrived.
Debian, from Lenny to Trixie
Each major VE version follows a Debian release. 8 = Bookworm (2023), Proxmox EOL August 2026. 9 = Trixie (August 2025). 9.1 (November 2025) began creating LXC containers from OCI images. Version 9.2 (21 May 2026): Debian 13.5, kernel 7.0, QEMU 11.0, LXC 7.0, ZFS 2.4, Ceph Tentacle, dynamic load balancer, WireGuard in SDN, custom CPU models, HA arm/disarm for maintenance. Rolling: the official advice is to stay on the latest stable release.
VMware, Broadcom and the 20-year mark
April 2025: the GmbH turns 20. August 2025: VE 9 on the anniversary, with Broadcom having just raised vSphere prices. September 2026: Proxmox North America Inc. and 24/7 support starting 19 October (Premium; Standard in Q4). The company's own numbers: 2,3 million VE servers, 60 thousand enterprise plans, 3 thousand partners. It's still the hypervisor a homelab installs on the weekend and a European datacenter uses during the day — the same ISO.
Proxmox, Xen, XCP-ng
Proxmox is KVM (type 1 through the kernel) + LXC. Xen is another type 1, outside the kernel — The history of Xen. The Citrix product is XenServer; the free fork is XCP-ng. On a laptop, the cube: VirtualBox. Debian underneath almost all of this: The history of Ian Murdock.
VE 9.2, kernel 7.0, AGPLv3, Vienna. The orange of >< doesn't need vCenter. It needs a browser and a disk.