Without knowing almost anything about it, I run Proximo on a box at home.

Is it at all comparable to ESX?

I kind of assumed the Proxmox was just the free and cheap and bare bones option.

In terms of features, they match on the simple / broad features. When it comes to scale, reliability, defined compatibility, and supporting tools that is a big no.

I have worked on VMWare stack in previous jobs. but I run proxmox at home now.

Free ESXi without VMware tools is somewhat harder actually. Still far better reliability.

or to MNX Triton or vanilla SmartOS, they're the greatest.

How is MNX Triton, a public cloud offering, an alternative to an on-prem, private cloud solution?

I'm sure that SmartOS is great, but being based on Illumos, I'd be hesitant to switch. Illumos doesn't have the most expansive community or hardware support as far as I know.

> How is MNX Triton, a public cloud offering, an alternative to an on-prem, private cloud solution?

By doing on-prem private installation of it [0]. Support contract is not necessary. We run illumos on HPe hardware from Gen6 to Gen10 and there are no issues. Even have GPU compute going via passthrough to ubuntu bhyve HVM.

[0] https://docs.tritondatacenter.com/private-cloud/install

Now this is very interesting and I'm excited to read up on it. Thanks for the link!

How does it compare to Proxmox, if you don't mind? Both seem to have distributed VM and storage and VM/CT support, software network support... if Triton has better SDN I may be interested in it.

I remember taking a quick hobbyist look at JoyentOS or something like that about five years ago, but I thought the project died... I'm shocked to hear it's still alive.