{"id":12629,"date":"2025-12-01T05:55:03","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T13:55:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.infoblox.com\/?p=12629"},"modified":"2025-12-08T05:38:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T13:38:09","slug":"nios-on-proxmox-nios-9-0-8-brings-more-choice-for-virtualizing-ddi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.infoblox.com\/blog\/company\/nios-on-proxmox-nios-9-0-8-brings-more-choice-for-virtualizing-ddi\/","title":{"rendered":"NIOS on Proxmox: NIOS 9.0.8 Brings More Choice for Virtualizing DDI"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the drive to balance cost, control and capabilities, organizations in every industry continue to lean heavily on virtualization\u2014including 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. <\/p>\n

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\u2019re asking Infoblox to help\u2014and we\u2019re listening. With the latest release of our market-leading solution for managing and securing foundational network services, NIOS 9.0.8, we\u2019ve added a new name to the list of virtualization environments qualified to run NIOS: Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE).<\/p>\n

Meet Proxmox: Open, Capable and Enterprise-Ready<\/h3>\n

If you\u2019re 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\u2014essential for running in production environments. <\/p>\n

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)<\/strong><\/a> versions, NIOS 9.0.6 and 9.0.7. <\/p>\n

What should you expect when running NIOS on Proxmox? The same excellent performance, resiliency, scalability and manageability you\u2019d get running NIOS on any other qualified hypervisor. And we can say that with confidence\u2014because we\u2019ve been using it ourselves.<\/p>\n

Lessons from Infoblox\u2019s Own Deployment<\/h3>\n

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. \u201cOur IT team had Proxmox up before the official qualification even began, which helped validate its performance in real-world production environments,\u201d says Lakshmikanth (\u201cKanth\u201d) Nakkana, senior manager, Engineering. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe downloaded Proxmox and it just worked,\u201d Kanth says. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Proxmox Deployment Recommendations<\/h3>\n

Based on this qualification testing, Infoblox Engineering offers the following recommendations for anyone evaluating NIOS on Proxmox VE:<\/p>\n

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  • Confirm you\u2019re using a qualified NIOS version.<\/strong> If you\u2019re not using a NIOS 9.X release, upgrade to NIOS 9.0.8 before deploying.<\/li>\n
  • Validate host size based on KVM.<\/strong> 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.<\/li>\n
  • Plan a member-by-member migration.<\/strong> Cross-platform \u201cimage migration\u201d 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.) \u201cIt\u2019s a simple switch,\u201d notes Kanth. \u201cDatabase synchronization works as expected, and we\u2019ve tested this use case thoroughly.\u201d<\/li>\n
  • Consider purchasing a Proxmox Support subscription for production deployments.<\/strong> 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    You can also check out our new video, which provides an overview and deployment walkthrough of NIOS on Proxmox.<\/p>\n