Subscriptions

PVE subscriptions

Proxmox Virtual Environment (aka PVE) is free open software (see this page for info about license, sources etc), and the company that developed it (Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH) offers support in many ways, with different support channel, level and pricing.

The only authoritative place for all options, pricing and all commercial details is the "Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH" company server PVE section (http://www.proxmox.com/proxmox-ve), which can redirect you to the "maurer-it.com" domain - belonging to "Maurer IT Systemlösungen KG" - for buying commercial options such as support subscriptions.

In particular, here you can find more information:

About the relation beetween "Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH" and "Maurer IT Systemlösungen KG" see:

About this page

This wiki page only has the purpose to collect and link all the information and instructions related to the subscriptions and the PVE system usage and experience.

Please do not refer to what follows as "official commercial information", like pricing, banking details, and such: see above links for that.

the 3.1 change

Since version 3.1 subscriptions became more "evident" to PVE users, because on nodes without any subscription registered, users started to get a message each time logging into each node's web gui ("You do not have a valid subscription for this server. Please visit www.proxmox.com to get a list of available options."). That message was a part of a partial change in the PVE repositories organization, in part related to subscription options, and many users initially complained a lot on the community forums before fully understanding the reason for that message, what changed, and so on.

Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH stated then clearly their point about Proxmox VE Support Subscriptions - and why everybody should buy one (see this forum sticky post).

Your PVE node/cluster will work even if you have no subscription, and you will get support through the forums too (by PVE team and users/volunteers), but:

you will get the message each time you log into each node's web gui ("You do not have a valid subscription for this server. Please visit www.proxmox.com to get a list of available options.")
you will not be able to access the entreprise (stable) repositories
you will not get support in any other way (Customer Portal, SSH)
you will not get any support tickets

If you understand the value of the work provided by PVE team by creating, maintaining and evolving a powerful system like PVE, and supporting anyone through community forums, you should buy subscription for (at least) your production systems: you'll get the benefits in the future.

Payment options

You can pay subscription by bank transfer, paypal (including credit cards): refer also to http://shop.maurer-it.com/knowledgebase.php.

A few notes:

bank transfer: this is the preferred method, as it cost less to PVE team, related details are provided by the related site (see above links)
paypal: this will also allow you to pay with your credit card, if supported by paypal (even if you have no paypal account)

Available subscriptions and how to calculate total amount

There are different subscription levels avaliable, with pricing related to CPU & covered months.

(price / CPU & month) x (sockets count) x (subscription months)

By "CPU" it's meant physical socket used, ie what is the output of this command on the PVE command line, on each node:

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "physical id" | sort | uniq | wc -l

if it outputs 2, then you have 2 sockets on that node, so your subscription for that node will be, eg:

(AMOUNT eur) x (2 sockets) x (12 months) = (24 x AMOUNT) eur

You need to have enough sockets licensed for all the nodes under subscription, eg if you have:

3 nodes with 2 sockets each

you need

6 sockets licensed in all (should be the same if is 1 subscription for 6 sockets or 3 subscriptions for 2 sockets each, since the price is the same)

Subscription keys usage

Once you pay for subscription, you will get subscription keys that must be uploaded to your nodes.

You can do this through the web GUI:

Select a node
Scroll down to the "Subscription" tab, click on it
Click the "Upload subscription key" button
Paste there your subscription key, and press OK

Then you can enable "enterprise repositories" as indicated in Package Repositories.

Note: it will take some time (a few hours at least) for your subscription to be registered, so don't expect "enterprise repositories" to work immediately.

Apart from that, if you feel your subscription is not working, open a request via the above sites (see https://shop.maurer-it.com)