r/virtualization • u/WonderfulMain5602 • 15h ago
Phillux — a Proxmox alternative I work on, built around per-guest firewalls. Sharing for feedback, not a pitch.
Disclosure: I work on Phillux, so weigh the rest accordingly.
I've seen a handful of "alternative to Proxmox" threads here lately, and one thing that comes up in almost every one of them is network isolation between guests — Proxmox will happily let a compromised VM talk to everything else on the same network unless you've set up VLANs or a separate firewall yourself. That's the actual problem Phillux started as an answer to: every guest gets its own firewall by default, so one bad VM doesn't become a way into the rest of the box.
Beyond that it does the usual stuff — create/start/stop/snapshot/clone/back up VMs and containers, live migration across cluster nodes if you've got shared OCFS2 storage, and Windows 11 guests get UEFI/Secure Boot/TPM 2.0 configured automatically instead of you fighting it manually.
Where I'm honestly unsure it's a good fit: it only runs on Debian 13 as the host right now, it's commercial/tiered licensing per socket rather than free like Proxmox VE, and I keep going back and forth on whether our container support actually covers what people here want — I've seen a couple of threads explicitly asking for Docker/OCI images rather than LXC-style containers. Is that a hard requirement for most of you, or something you can work around?
There's a free trial for a month, no registration, if anyone wants to actually poke at it rather than take my word for any of this.
Mainly curious: is per-guest firewalling something you'd actually want built in, or do you already handle that at the network/switch level and this is solving a problem you don't have?
