Is Virtualizor or Solus VM 2 better for KVM VPS offering?

[Minhaz]

Hi everyone, I am considering offering KVM VPS via WHMCS and I am stuck in choosing Virtualizor or Solus VM 2. In my opinion, Solus VM 2 is better but the requirement of deploying their admin panel on a separate VPS is what is stopping me from going with them.

I would like to hear what you all think is best to offer clients KVM VPS. Thank you all in advance.

 

[SharedGrid]

Can I ask why you've ruled out other solutions that aren't Virtualizor or SolusVM?

There are two others I can recommend you take a look at; VirtFusion and Proxmox, which in my opinion are much superior compared to Virtualizor and SolusVM. A few pros and cons I can think of from the top of my head back when we last went through vendor trials for a VPS control panel:

Virtualizor - It's very feature rich but it comes at a cost of being buggy, there are quite a few bugs that have been present for years and not resolved.

SolusVM - It's owned by WebPros, take a look at the price increases of cPanel over the last few years. It's something I would avoid building my VPS infrastructure around. I have no other opinion on SolusVM apart from this.

VirtFusion - Great UI, very easy to use, only supports KVM so it's a simpler system. Only a very small Dev team. There is less of a reliance on billing system plugins as the customer mostly manages their VPS through the VF control panel.

Proxmox - Very much Enterprise ready and feature rich, there are very large businesses using Proxmox; it's free. If you want support then it's quite expensive. The plugins for most popular billing systems seem to be lacking a lot of features for automation between them and Proxmox.

 

[Minhaz]

@SharedGrid thank you for your detailed reply. Answer your question:
Why I ruled out others was mainly because I required my clients to manage their VPS from WHMCS itself without being redirected to the VPS control panel.

But I do find it ironic that platforms like VirtFusion and SolusVm require users to have the admin panel on a separate VPS when we are using them to offer our clients VPS…

 

[SharedGrid]

@SharedGrid thank you for your detailed reply. Answer your question:
Why I ruled out others was mainly because I required my clients to manage their VPS from WHMCS itself without being redirected to the VPS control panel.

Aha okay, that makes sense. I'm not sure VirtFusion offers a User API to even make that a possibility by customising the current WHMCS module or creating a new one - I can only find the administrator API in their docs.

Proxmox has a module for WHMCS which includes all those client area features, it's a third party module and quite costly at nearly $300 per year.

I think out of your options between SolusVM and Virtualizor, I would go with Virtualizor. Their pricing has been pretty stable. The SolusVM pricing also has been but I can't trust them, personally.

 

[systeminplace]

Hello there,

We use SolusVM2. Now with that being said there are some major pros and cons in using this software.

Pros:
Sleek, simple and fast.

Their support is honestly at the top of the market, and its free. Someone is always there to respond quickly and in our experience, 99% of the time its fixed within an hour.

Some mentioned above why the master control panel should be in a separate vps? We consider this a huge pro. It is super simple to back it up and snapshot it, its easy to move to another node, and if something goes wrong we only need to fix a VPS and not an entire node with customers running on it. And trust me it can happen. The other benefit is if the master goes down, your compute nodes are still up and running. If you run a combined master/compute node I cant guarantee this.

Updating your master and compute nodes is simple and easily done with one click in the master web panel.

Cons:
As SharedGrid mentioned, they are now owned by the same people who run cPanel. And due to cPanel's unjust increases (we feel), we have moved all our newer nodes to other software.

Is missing some critical features such as the ability to custom edit xml files or to use disks that are not NFS or local such as iscsi, we had to do some custom stuff to get our iscsi to work. These options were available and easy to do in SolusVM1 but not in 2. Solus seems to have moved to a voting system on suggestions where highest votes get implemented. But I honestly cant see why this isn't a priority.

Although there is WHMCS implementation (and its completely free), you must make a package on WHMCS AND on Solus for everything you offer. This should be created on the fly IMO from the WHMCS packages. This doubles the work.

Permissions system can be confusing and allow people to do things you don't want them to if you don't understand this. TEST your permissions, THIS IS CRITICAL!

Firewall rules and management are pretty much non existent. There are 7 checkboxes to allow or deny things such as mail, icmp replys, arp flood protection etc. And these apply to EVERY VPS, not individually. With robustness of linux firewall software, this should be available on a per VPS basis.


On a second note, we have used proxmox which I personally feel was superior in many ways, the WHMCS support just was not there. Had they developed a community WHMCS module then we would be running proxmox.

Paying $300/year + for a module I believe is absolutely ridiculous. There are far better things that money can go to which improves our customers experiences and lowers our overall pricing and SolusVM2 is that sweet spot.