I’ve been using PM for about a year now. It’s quite nice, although I’ll fully admit I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. I’ve heard a lot of people transition to Prox and adapt fairly quickly.
It's not... A walk in the park, and some stuff will have you manually editing files, as the UI might be missing those. But so far I've been a happy user for a bunch of years.
I can't count the number of times I had to do that under ESXi, or do manual vSAN recoveries, so I found myself quite comfortable doing that in proxmox too (especially since proxmox is regular debian).
Yeah, not unlike the Linux experience; there will be times where you have to touch and/or nano configs. If you’re comfortable with such things, excellent. If not.. you fidna get comfortable.
As someone who moved to Proxmox for my 3-node homelab, good luck.
I find the automation for deploying VMs to be woefully incapable compared to Terraform/PowerCLI on the VMware side. Not to mention things like load balancing/DRS are flat out missing.
I managed to get it stable enough for homelab-y things like *arr, plex, DNS, etc - but at this point I would quit rather than use it in a production environment. Or maybe I would just look at bare metal kubernetes instead.
IaaS or gtfo? I would love to see more development in this area, but I think you might be covering a bit too much ground with "in a production environment". Tons of smaller (and not so small) companies are still running piles of bare metal chaos and could benefit greatly from even the simplest Proxmox setup.
The biggest issue is being in aware of migrations for load balancing. If VM 1 is deployed to Node 1 with Terraform, then is moved to Node 2 at some point for load balancing, Terraform tries to recreate it on Node 1.
Also, I have a slight moral objection to one of the top providers being developed by a for-profit prison company.