The economics of the Incus 6.9 surge for LXD and Proxmox teams
Organizations are migrating to Proxmox to avoid VMware licensing increases of up to 5x. Proxmox offers a low-cost three-node support plan under $1,000 per year while Incus 6.9 updates address complex container and virtual machine management needs.
The VMware Exodus and Proxmox Economics
The Broadcom acquisition of VMware forced many organizations to face licensing increases between 2x and 5x. I see teams moving to Proxmox to avoid these subscription bundles. Proxmox provides a free-core hypervisor that includes clustering and high availability without upfront license fees. For businesses needing curated updates, a three-node support plan costs less than $1,000 per year. Because Proxmox allows for the use of internal storage devices on each host to run Ceph OSDs, it eliminates the dependency on dedicated storage appliances that many older enterprise environments relied upon for their primary workloads. I find that moving to software-defined storage with Ceph simplifies infrastructure. Proxmox also supports mini PC hardware, such as Minisforum MS-01s, which reduces power consumption and heat while providing 10Gb networking and NVMe storage density. This hardware choice helps mitigate the heat and noise issues common in older rack setups. Independent Blockbridge testing showed the open-source platform outperforming ESXi in 56 of 57 storage tests. This performance advantage, including roughly 50% higher peak IOPS and 30% lower latency, makes the transition attractive. While vSphere uses a vCenter-based client for centralized management, Proxmox uses a built-in web interface to manage clusters without a separate appliance. Proxmox also contains native HA, clustering, a REST API, CLI, and 2FA out of the box.
Incus 6.9 and the Storage Complexity
The Incus 6.9 surge addresses specific needs for teams managing containers and virtual machines. Incus 6.6 provides clustered LVM support, which allows users to create clustered LVM volume groups. This capability helps teams leverage NVMe-OF or NVMe-OTCP for block device transmission. Users often deploy this on a mixture of Debian 10 and Debian 12 nodes using the MOFED driver with connectx-3 pro cards. Incus 6.19 provides initial SELinux support and improved Windows agent support for virtual machines. This release also adds serial devices in the resources API and bandwidth limits on OVN NICs. Users can now use PKCS12 generation in the CLI and find new options for raw units in CLI CSV output. These updates address the requirements of users managing complex container environments. I find these additions useful for those seeking more control over their deployment. You probably know that managing ZFS pools in Incus requires specific steps when resizing a disk. If you use a ZFS loop device, you must expand the LVM partition and the file system to use the new space. However, I notice that hot migration of virtual machines remains difficult when disks are mounted on remote storage pools. The Ceph RBD backend lacks the volumeMultiNode attribute, which prevents successful instance moves when a custom volume is already attached to an instance on a different node. One user running kernel version 6.7.8-arch1-1 reported this failure with the error: "Error: Instance move to destination failed: Error transferring instance data: Failed migration on target: Failed start validation for device ‘disk-wbT0xjUaD5’: Custom volume is already attached to an instance on a different node." I see that users on TrueNAS still face issues with outdated software, as Incus 6.0.4 failed to address CVE-2025-52881.
Hardware and Deployment Realities
| Plan Type | Estimated Annual Cost |
| Proxmox three-node plan | Under $1,000 |
| VMware subscription bundles | 2x to 5x increase |
The economics of choosing a platform depend on the scale of the cluster. For small clusters, Proxmox provides a low-cost path through its per-node subscription model. I recommend these subscriptions when you need enterprise repositories and predictable maintenance windows. Incus provides commercial support through Zabbly, ranging from one-off services to feature sponsorship. This provides an alternative for teams that need professional review of their deployment or help with initial migration from LXD. I find the distinction between using VMs as container hosts versus using them as application platforms a significant part of the modern infrastructure strategy. Organizations are increasingly prioritizing containers over virtual machines to improve resource utilization and deployment speed. While VMware provides bundled subscriptions like Cloud Foundation, vSphere Foundation, Standard, and Essentials Plus, Proxmox provides more granular control over node roles. This flexibility helps reduce the total cost of ownership by matching features to specific needs. For 24×7 requirements, businesses should plan partner-managed services or external monitoring to fill gaps. This is especially true when managing Ceph, which allows for the use of RBD for VM disks and CephFS for shared file storage. Will the continued development of Incus provide enough stability to rival the mature ecosystem of VMware?
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