In the drive to balance cost, control and capabilities, organizations in every industry continue to lean heavily on virtualization—including for foundational network services like DNS, DHCP and IP address management (DDI). Indeed, for many IT teams, flexibility in how and where they run these critical services has never been more important.
Today though, some organizations are reassessing virtualization strategies that have relied on a single vendor, seeking to diversify their on-prem environments. With the ability to run NIOS consistently across multiple hypervisors, they aim to reduce operational risk and gain more flexibility to optimize for cost/control at different sites. They’re asking Infoblox to help—and we’re listening. With the latest release of our market-leading solution for managing and securing foundational network services, NIOS 9.0.8, we’ve added a new name to the list of virtualization environments qualified to run NIOS: Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE).
Meet Proxmox: Open, Capable and Enterprise-Ready
If you’re exploring options to diversify your virtualization footprint and evaluating open-source platforms, Proxmox is likely on your shortlist. It tightly integrates the KVM hypervisor and Linux containers (LXC) in one platform, making it a natural fit with NIOS, which many customers already run on KVM. As with other popular virtualization platforms, Proxmox offers a long list of features: live/online virtual machine (VM) migration, software-defined networking (SDN), multiple interface options (REST API/CLI or web UI), high availability (HA) for clusters and even available enterprise support subscriptions—essential for running in production environments.
Now, you can add NIOS support as well, providing another great option for virtualized DDI deployments alongside existing options, including VMware, Nutanix, OpenStack and several others. This qualification also extends to previous releases in the NIOS 9.X train, including the recent Long-Term Support (LTS) versions, NIOS 9.0.6 and 9.0.7.
What should you expect when running NIOS on Proxmox? The same excellent performance, resiliency, scalability and manageability you’d get running NIOS on any other qualified hypervisor. And we can say that with confidence—because we’ve been using it ourselves.
Lessons from Infoblox’s Own Deployment
To pressure test the Proxmox virtualization experience, Infoblox Engineering stood up Proxmox VE in the lab and coordinated with our IT organization, which had already begun using Proxmox internally. “Our IT team had Proxmox up before the official qualification even began, which helped validate its performance in real-world production environments,” says Lakshmikanth (“Kanth”) Nakkana, senior manager, Engineering.
Through the lab qualification, Engineering performed extensive testing of Proxmox in diverse customer scenarios, using both command-line interface (CLI) as well as the VMware-like UI that Proxmox adds on top of KVM for deployment and operations. Unsurprisingly, given that Proxmox is based on KVM and Linux, which already support NIOS in production environments worldwide, the deployment and testing went smoothly.
“We downloaded Proxmox and it just worked,” Kanth says. “We used our existing KVM image, and the instance booted up with no issues. Core DDI features worked as expected, as did system-level capabilities like HA and interface management.”
Proxmox Deployment Recommendations
Based on this qualification testing, Infoblox Engineering offers the following recommendations for anyone evaluating NIOS on Proxmox VE:
- Confirm you’re using a qualified NIOS version. If you’re not using a NIOS 9.X release, upgrade to NIOS 9.0.8 before deploying.
- Validate host size based on KVM. Choose host sizes consistent with existing KVM deployments, as NIOS on Proxmox uses the same KVM-based vNIOS images and exhibits similar performance characteristics in internal testing.
- Plan a member-by-member migration. Cross-platform “image migration” tools can sometimes have unpredictable effects, such as disrupting license signatures. To avoid any potential issues when moving existing NIOS members to Proxmox, power down and then re-deploy members instead. (Power down the existing VM, instantiate a new NIOS VM on Proxmox with the same IP addressing and rejoin the Grid.) “It’s a simple switch,” notes Kanth. “Database synchronization works as expected, and we’ve tested this use case thoroughly.”
- Consider purchasing a Proxmox Support subscription for production deployments. With this qualification, Infoblox fully supports NIOS running on qualified Proxmox environments. To address any potential hypervisor issues (such as Proxmox host upgrades or driver interactions), however, we recommend purchasing an Enterprise Support Subscription from Proxmox Support to expedite triage, while Infoblox addresses any NIOS-related findings.
Looking Ahead
If you’re considering Proxmox as part of your virtualization strategy—whether for labs, specific cost-optimized sites or your entire footprint—NIOS is ready to accompany you on this journey. With NIOS 9.0.8, you have a qualified path to deploy with confidence, using the same industry-leading DDI capabilities you expect, backed by Infoblox support. It’s the latest example of our ongoing investment in NIOS and our commitment to help you realize maximum value from Infoblox DDI—no matter how you choose to deploy.
