Migrating from VMware to Proxmox with Veeam: A Seamless Transition

Alexandru Lovin

Storage System Engineer
alexandru.lovin@alef.com

With businesses constantly seeking cost-effective and flexible virtualization solutions, Proxmox has emerged as a powerful alternative to VMware. Recognizing this shift, Veeam has enhanced its backup and restore capabilities to support Proxmox, allowing businesses to migrate their workloads efficiently.

This capability is a game-changer for companies looking to optimize costs while maintaining high-performance virtualization. If you're considering this transition, here’s why and how you can leverage Veeam for a smooth migration.

Why Migrate to Proxmox?

Many organizations are re-evaluating their VMware infrastructure due to rising licensing costs and vendor lock-in. Proxmox offers a compelling alternative with benefits such as:

  • Open-source flexibility – No restrictive licensing fees.
  • Cost-effectiveness – Reduced TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) compared to proprietary solutions.
  • Robust performance – A feature-rich virtualization platform with support for both KVM and LXC containers.
  • Seamless integration – Works well with modern backup and disaster recovery solutions like Veeam.

By leveraging Veeam’s Proxmox support, businesses can execute this transition with minimal risk and downtime.

So lets begin the process by adding the Proxmox hypervisor to Veeam

Navigate to the Backup Infrastructure menu.

You will be prompted with an wizard in which you need to provide DNS name or IP and credentials for the hosts.

After this step, you will need to add an Proxmox VE worker from Backup Infrastructure menu > Backup Proxies (note that this step can be prompted automatically after you add the host, if not, you can do it manually) and add a new proxy.

This will create a small VM that will be automatically start only when its needed by Veeam and it will be closed after the job is done.

Provide the necessary details for this vm and finish the wizard.

On the Proxmox host a new vm will appear and after all the internal setup will power off.

Now we are ready to move a vm from Vmware to Proxmox.

For this we will need to have a backup job in place

Since the Instant Recovery feature of Veeam is not yet supported on Proxmox we will need to do a full restore to proxmox.

This means that the vm on Vmware does not need to be stopped.

To start the process you need to go on Home > Backups and select the disk of the vm you want to move and start Restore entire VM to Proxmox.

Follow the wizard, you can add more VM to the process if you have more backup jobs available.

You can also use different backup point in time to move to Prox thus you can use this feature for DEV and Test using a actual production VM.

This is another applicability of this restore capability:  your Prod vm will continue to run on the Prod  Vmware environment while the same vm can be run on isolated cheaper proxmox before full on change of prod from vmware to proxmox.

Getting back, you can select another vm if you want to:

Continuing, you need to select Restore to new location because we want to move it from the vmware.

For each VM you will need to select a host where it will be located.

Given that I have a 2 host cluster I will distribute the vms on both hosts.

As any other VM it will need a storage so in the next step chose what storage you have on those hosts.

You can also specify a disk type for a conversion from vmdk if you want.

Final screen should look like this:

Next, you can rename the vm if you want and select the networks for the vm on proxmox

I recommend that you will not connect the vm to the network or make sure that you are not on the same network as production or you will have ip conflicts.

A summary of what changes will be displayed

I recommend not checking “Power on target VM”, unless you are sure you will not create network conflicts with the original VM.

After the finish button is pressed the migration will start.

The proxyworker will be booted up on the Proxmox and after that the actual move of the VMDK will occur.

This is the Proxmox point of view of what is happening:

After the Proxworker is fully started succesfuly, the actual vm will appear on the Proxmox console.

Proxmox view

At this time the vm is created, but the disk is still on the transfer phase so you cannot start the vm.

The actual time of transfer depends on your network speed and storage speed.

Once the transfer is completed, the worker will shut down and will lay in wait for the next set of tasks.

Proxmox View

NOTE that both vm and worker on the prox1 nodes are down while on the second node the transfer is still not ready.

fter the transfer is complete, you can now power on the VM from proxmox.

Finalizing the Migration

Once the disk transfer completes, you can power on the VM in Proxmox. Keep in mind:

  • The transfer time depends on network speed and storage performance.
  • The migrated VM remains in Proxmox but is initially powered off.
  • You can now create a new backup job in Veeam to protect the VM within the Proxmox environment.

Why Veeam is the Perfect Partner for This Transition

With its enterprise-grade backup and disaster recovery solutions, Veeam simplifies what could otherwise be a complex migration. Organizations transitioning from VMware to Proxmox can benefit from:

Minimal downtime

Keep production environments running while testing in Proxmox.

Flexible recovery options 

Choose the best restore points for your needs.

Automated backup strategies

Ensure continuous protection post-migration.

This migration approach ensures minimal risk and maximum efficiency while enabling a smooth transition from VMware to Proxmox. Whether you're making the move to cut costs, increase flexibility, or future-proof your virtualization environment, Veeam’s integration makes the process significantly easier.

If you want to learn more about migrating from VMware to Proxmox with Veeam, the ALEF Distribution RO team can help you.

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