Introduction
Running virtual infrastructure should not require a PhD in distributed systems or a team of 15 platform engineers. Yet that is exactly where the industry has landed.
VMware licenses cost a fortune and lock you into a vendor ecosystem that gets more expensive every year. OpenStack gives you freedom but demands a small army to operate. Most alternatives either sacrifice simplicity for flexibility or flexibility for simplicity.
Proxmox is an excellent hypervisor that avoids both traps. But out of the box, it is an infrastructure tool built for sysadmins. There is no self-service portal for developers or end-users, no multi-tenancy with resource isolation, and no single pane of glass for managing clusters across locations.
flex.plane closes that gap. It takes your existing Proxmox infrastructure and turns it into a fully-featured private cloud platform with self-service, multi-tenancy, and managed Kubernetes. Think of it this way: the Proxmox UI is for your sysadmins. The flex.plane Portal is for your end-users. The Portal is to Proxmox what vCloud Director is to VMware.
Meet flex.plane
flex.plane is a management layer built on Proxmox VE. It provides a clean way to create and operate virtual machines, networks, storage, and Kubernetes clusters across multiple Proxmox clusters, without adding operational burden.
The core principles:
- Self-service. End-users create VMs, networks, and Kubernetes clusters through the portal without sysadmin intervention. Admins define the guardrails (compute profiles, storage profiles, quotas). Users operate within them.
- Stateless by design. The orchestrator has no database. All state is derived from neighboring systems (Proxmox, Kubernetes, your identity provider, your mesh network) at request time. If flex.plane goes down, your workloads keep running.
- Simple to operate. A small team can run flex.plane in production. Features are designed with day-2 operations in mind: self-healing where possible, minimal maintenance, small blast radius.
- Non-intrusive. flex.plane is a management layer, not a dependency. Platform downtime never causes workload downtime.
- Multi-zone, hybrid-capable. Manage Proxmox clusters across data centers and regions from a single control plane. Extend into cloud providers when needed.
The platform exposes a GraphQL API, ships with a modern web portal, and uses standard OIDC for authentication. Everything you can do in the portal, you can do via the API.
See what's included
A flex.plane deployment consists of these components:
| Component | What it does |
|---|---|
| Orchestrator | The GraphQL API gateway. Aggregates state from Proxmox, Kubernetes, and your mesh network. Stateless, no database. |
| Portal | The self-service web dashboard for managing VMs, networks, clusters, and VDCs. Built for end-users and platform admins alike. |
| Agent | A per-node daemon running on each Proxmox host. Manages images, routing, edge gateways, and acts as an authenticating proxy to the local Proxmox API. |
| Identity | Zitadel OIDC provider for authentication and role management. |
| Mesh overlay | A peer-to-peer WireGuard-based VPN for secure inter-node communication and service discovery. |
Everything is deployed via Helm charts onto a Kubernetes management cluster (or provided as a managed SaaS). The Proxmox nodes themselves only need the agent installed. No Kubernetes required on the compute side.