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While I am excited to see that quite a decent number of past clients I've had are considering proxmox and other virtualization stacks, I am not confident there will be a fast answer for this new change in the virtualization realm.

Large and Enterprise companies won't really be bothered by the change except the price, and unless other platforms include all the "Enterprise Check-boxes" they think they want, I'm not sure how fast adoption will be if at all for stacks like Proxmox.

I am not defending the business model or the tech offerings of Vmware, Microsoft, etc -- far from it. They're extremely bloated, buggy, and unless you happen to be one of VMware or Microsoft's most expensive customers, the support might as well just be a sin tax. Even for the "biggest" clients, they were not able to get Vmware or Microsoft to budge on some pretty obvious and complete blocker bugs that would drop production environments entirely.

Enterprise is weird -- I would be extremely happy if not a bit exhausted supporting a large OSS virtualization infrastructure for clients, but I just do not see it happening without a lot of "carrots" for such companies from the virtualization vendor. Enterprise business is basically about shifting responsibility and liability for your tech-stack to someone else -- yes, it requires strong tech skills to use these tech-stacks, but the more maintenance/liability that can be shifted to the vendor, the more preferable it is for most companies.

I don't know what the businesses will choose -- I'm hopeful medium and smaller businesses will shift to more open solutions and from this business, the open solutions will be able to grow and become more attractive choices for enterprise, I'm just not sure that such solutions will avoid the tech industry's obsession with subscription licensing and feature bloat to check boxes.

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> * Application Aware processing for common applications like SQL, Sharepoint, etc I think this is different than what you call "Application Level", as an Application Aware Backup will use technology to flush cache, finish tranactions, prune logs, etc to put the application in "saved" or "backup ready" state, PBS creates "Crash Consistent" backups only, basically as if you just pulled the power from the VM, some applications this will corrupt data, Application Aware backups work to prevent that corruption

> So you have a web portal where a Help Desk Tech can take a user request for a file to be restored back to a vm, open a web portal search for the indivual file then either download that file and email it to the user, or restore it back to the VM, or restore it to a completely different VM depending on the use case???

> Sure you can do it that why, but veeam has support for this in their product, in the UI that is already part of my work flow, this is what I consider a "OS Level or Storage level hack" it is not really part of Proxmox, but part of the underlying linux OS or Storage solution.

> Veeam use ReFS or XFS to only store one version of a block no matter how many backups are taken, this is done in the veeam software and works with their VBK file format. ZFS has some dedup which is what proxmox relies on but it works differently than Veeam, and seems to be less effective. These Block Cloning also works with the Data Format uploaded to S3 to massively save on storage costs.