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Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
In certain large industries it feels like there's more urgency to migrate off of VMware than there is to do genAI stuff.
Do others sense this? If so, what options do you see for folks to keep their servers but move off of VMware? Is it all RedHat?
- that_lurker 11mo agoWill be interesting to see if large organizations move to Proxmox
- theossuary 11mo agoI don't think Proxmox is anywhere near ready for that sort of shift. It's interesting what a big hole in the market VMWare is leaving and nothing quite fills it. OpenStack is the closest, but way more complicated than VMWare, and doesn't work at all for smaller deployments.
- ghaff 11mo agoI’m not sure that’s true for larger scale installs but small scale VMware installs are probably less easily replaced by solutions that are also as well supported and have a path for expanding. Doing a head-on VMware takeout path hasn’t been a good business strategy for companies that tried it.
- kaliszad 11mo agoFor small SMBs using Proxmox is reasonably ok-ish. Running in production for 2+ years already our customers are quite happy. We also sent some patches to Proxmox for other much larger clients...
- jusims 11mo agoFormer VMware service provider here. We switched about 1,000 VMs from VMware to Proxmox VE a couple years back, and it's been one of our best moves. We run Proxmox hyper-converged now, love the built-in VM firewalls, solid backups with PBS, and Ceph storage. The paid subscription gives us reliable updates, too. Hardware requirements for Proxmox are way more flexible (and cheaper) than VMware, in our experience. Plus, more MSPs are jumping on the Proxmox train, so the support scene is growing fast. Proxmox isn’t a perfect VMware clone, but it covers a lot of ground for service providers or mid-sized setups that want reliability, flexibility, and lower costs.
- SoftTalker 11mo agoLinux. kvm or lxc. Hire a couple of sysadmins who know their ass from a hole in the ground.
- phito 11mo agoWe are moving to proxmox
- INTPenis 11mo agoThis is a hot topic among some of my nerdier SME friends, and our conclusion is that the major players are HPE and Nutanix. At least from our perspective over here in Sweden. HPE did a big brain move to support multiple hypervisor backends with their own frontend. The only way to go forward imho. I'm using Proxmox at my current $dayjob, and we're quite happy with it. I come from a big VMware shop and I think most businesses could easily replace VMware with Proxmox. I think Proxmox should just launch an Enterprise contract, regardless of the cost, just have one. Because right now I think the main obstacle halting adoption is their lack of any Enterprise SLA. On a personal level I would love to see KubeVirt, or Openshift with KubeVirt, take over more. It just seems like a genius move to use the already established APIs of kubernetes with a hypervisor runtime.
- sgt 11mo agoProxmox is about to miss their window of opportunity here. They are uniquely positioned to take on VMWare, but their outfit seems like a fairly tiny and conservative company with zero ambition to take on the world, so to speak.
- bigstrat2003 11mo agoIf they aren't interested in that business, then it isn't really a window of opportunity for them. In fact I respect a company that chooses to not pursue business opportunities that don't fit their goals, and instead focus on being a good fit for the market they are in. Growth isn't the most important thing.
- Spivak 11mo agoI've been at multiple companies that wasted millions courting large enterprise contacts only to not make a single sale. It does make the sales update more exciting though—if we just get this one sale… I can't blame any company for wanting to stay out of that market.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- yuvadam 11mo agoOut of the loop: what's up with VMware?
- ofrzeta 11mo agoBroadcom bought VMware and changed the pricing.
- nikanj 11mo agoBought out by Broadcom, who realized if you increase prices by 10x and lose 75% of customers, you end with more revenue and less support costs
- chanandler_bong 11mo agoHock Tan's only goal is to increase stock value. Period. At the expense of anything and everything else, stock value.
- AzN1337c0d3r 11mo agoBought by Broadcom, now implementing classic strategy of leveraging vendor lock-in to milk customers.
- orev 11mo agoI find that regular libvirt/qemu with virt-manager or cockpit front-end on RHEL/Alma/Rocky is perfectly fine for plenty of situations.
- rcarmo 11mo agoI'm seeing a bit of everything: renegotiating (which Broadcom doesn't really do), optimizing and consolidating hosts (to lower costs), public cloud migration (which is why I see the most given my line of work, but may not represent everything), forays into other hypervisors, etc. Proxmox may come to many an HN visitor's mind (and I use it myself extensively, all my home services run on it), but it actually doesn't have a lot of enterprise features and isn't a drop-in replacement.
- basemi 11mo agoA major european bank is about to move everything they got on VMware to Hyper-V
- ofrzeta 11mo agoRed Hat is offering OpenShift virtualization, which is Kubernetes with Kubevirt. So some people might just use Kubernetes with Kubevirt. There's also Harvester "open source hyperconverged infrastructure" https://harvesterhci.io/ https://harvesterhci.io/ Or some Xen spinoff like https://xcp-ng.org/ https://xcp-ng.org/ Smaller shops are migrating to Proxmox.
- al_borland 11mo agoRed Hat has an implementation of OpenStack, which is more of a VMware replacement than OpenShift is.
- more_corn 11mo agoDo not ever use openshift
- rilindo 11mo agoCan you explain why I shouldn't use OpenShift?
- breakingcups 11mo agoI know they pulled a mini-Broadcom on us and sharply raised all our prices after our first two years of having our OpenShift clusters.
- esseph 11mo agoThey have a dominant percentage of banking workloads at this point.
- pickle-wizard 11mo agoIn my sphere most companies are going to either Hyper-V or the cloud. Hyper-V kinda won by default as a lot of orgs already had Windows Server licenses.
- b3lvedere 11mo agoSame here as well
- jwithington 11mo agohard to beat the MSFT bundle
- opengrass 11mo agoDocker or podman your stuff? There's an image of every OS.
- mmazurki 11mo agoSeeing a lot of Nutanix especially for VDI/Citrix heavy workloads or typical 3-tier applications. HP VME is also becoming a thing as an almost drop-in and VERY cost effective alternative to VMWare. In telco Openstack is still king AFAIK.
- cat-whisperer 11mo agodocker is the way!
- esseph 11mo agoThis was question at a very very very slow moving org and industry I was at until about a year ago. They went to Nutanix right before the broadcom acquisition and never looked back. They were much happier, and HCI was very nice for k8s nodes.
- NoUseForANick 11mo agoVirtualization is a 20 years old tech. Quit it.
- b3lvedere 11mo agoWhy?
- linksnapzz 11mo agoRather a lot older than that. But, even if you restrict it to 'x86 virtualization', the alternative for the current crop of 'enterprise' OS environments is ...server sprawl. I'm a big fan of discrete hw for some things, but it can be a hard sell for everything.
- chungy 11mo agoThe primary alternative to full system VMs is containers (or jails, zones... whatever your OS might call them). You don't need to go server sprawl or VMs as the only two options.
- linksnapzz 11mo agoFor many organizations & applications, containers are going to be a challenge. This is also why HyperV is a leading VMware replacement.
- kjs3 11mo agoIf you're so ignorant of the space you think virtualization is 20 years old, you're too ignorant to make proclamations about what anyone else should do.
- heavyset_go 11mo agoGive a few years and every process will be virtualized on all major operating systems.
- DiggyJohnson 11mo agoMostly bitching to corporate IT to make it possible to use alternative tools and workflows. Not kidding, that’s the main blocker. We have the DevOps knowledge on our team to go to containers, prepackaged dev environments, etc. But corporate cyber tends to respond to our requests to discuss cyber policy and escalate via proper channels with “sorry that’s against policy”. This is not my experience at one company but multiple good, name brand companies that generally do good engineering and software work.
- 1970-01-01 11mo ago3rd party trust is not a joke. Why should they drop what they're doing to go and audit a new critical vendor?
- loloquwowndueo 11mo agoBecause the old “trusted” vendor is now absurdly expensive and switching to another one helps increase profit? E.g. why did organizations switch from bare metal to virtualization in the first place?
- fragmede 11mo agoBecause the old vendor started charging 10x the price
- chanux 11mo agoThis. This always gets them. Just a matter of time.
- DiggyJohnson 11mo agoBecause those policies didn’t account for the workflows of engineering and dev teams. And I’m not even really asking for them to trust 3rd parties but to instead have a workflow to escalate and petition tools and workflows to become supported in house. For example Docker Desktop being disallowed with vigor for Windows machines because it’s a virtualization tool. But Docker is fine for Linux users. And confirmed it’s not a licensing or purchasing issue.
- Mave83 11mo agocroit.io, provides 24*7 enterprise support as a Proxmox Gold partner with a follow the sun support team.
- awesomeusername 11mo agoWe use Proxmox. NVidia are pushing hard in the direction of combined accelerators and ARM CPU (i.e. DGX, Thor, Jetson, etc). Some of the upcoming hardware hits a sweet spot in terms of performance / $ / W. It's hard to ignore. But Proxmox is ignoring ARM. Which is a big mistake IMO
- justinclift 11mo ago> But Proxmox is ignoring ARM. If you're not already aware of this, then it might be worth keeping an eye on: https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1314 https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1314
- stoitsev 11mo agoI'm with a block storage vendor that works with a lot of companies migrating off VMware, and the diversity of KVM-based cloud management platforms we're seeing is fascinating. We have customers moving to OpenNebula, CloudStack, Proxmox, OpenStack, HP VME, Oracle Virtualization, and even some homegrown solutions. The common thread is that they're all looking for a storage backend that is not tied to a specific hypervisor and can deliver predictable high performance. The beauty of the KVM ecosystem is the freedom to choose the best tool for the job, and that extends to the storage layer. A good software-defined block storage solution should have the features (data migration, disaster recovery) and capabilities to make the transition away from VMware as smooth as possible.
- erredois 11mo agoOpenstack second wind was definitelly not on my 2020s bingo card. But I agree kvm solutions have a lot of momentum.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- walterbell 11mo ago"VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong", 190 comments (2025), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45167239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45167239 "Proxmox VE: Import Wizard for Migrating VMware ESXi VMs", 100 comments (2024), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39841363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39841363
- gnopgnip 11mo agoI work for an MSP, mostly with small to medium companies. Licensing costs went up a ton when broadcom acquired vmware. They went up a ton more this year with minimum core counts, current licensing costs are roughly $20k a year minimum. They might hike the price again, even medium businesses that see some value in avoiding an expensive migration want to avoid this uncertainty. Basically they don't want to deal with small and medium sized businesses. I'm sure large businesses are facing price hikes too but I don't have experience with that. If you are on a perpetual license you can put the management vlan on a network not connected to the internet if it wasn't already and realistically this buys a few years. You will not be able to patch, eventually auditors will not accept that. For the rest not on perpetual licensing, when the licensing expires you will not be able to power on machines, if they reboot they stay off. About half of clients we are migrating to hyper-v. Most are already running windows servers. There are some differences but hyperv covers the important features and the licensing is basically already included. Beeam makes the virtual to virtual move a lot easier, this is what most of our customers use for backups For a good chunk they are migrating to azure or another hosted environment. If you don't have a main office with a file server or some more demanding line of business apps this is a pretty easy move. A few are going to nutanix. Or more of expanding nutanix.
- anakaine 11mo agoMy organisation went down the Nutanix path with about 1/4 of the DC about 18 months ago. They're now just finalising the move away feom Nutanix. From a server and dev admin point of view we had really odd VM behaviour, poorer than expected process performance, and random instability that just couldn't be resolved. I believe other system owners had similar and that the VM admins had their own range of oddities to track down. Something behind the scenes was the catalyst for change away in a short period of time.
- inemesitaffia 11mo agoWhat did you choose to replace?
- hdgvhicv 11mo agoJumping into bed with another single vendor. You dont think enterprise IT does sensible things like have multiple vendors to avoid single points of failure.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- vjvjvjvjghv 11mo agoI use VMWare Workstation a lot for testing and it's a very good workhorse for that. I hope they won't mess that up.
- natebc 11mo agoOur 5 year ELA for VMware went from 1.5M USD to 12M USD. I work in Higher ed. Our Hyper-V environment came online a few months ago. It was already included with our ELA with Microsoft so we were able to splash out a bit for some higher tier support. Granted, we have a separate team working on "genAI stuff." We started converting virtual machines about 3 weeks ago and we've gotten through ~500 of about 3500 or so. Our grant based HPC environment is just moving back to bare metal. The VM conversion is just for ad-hoc HPC and then all of our general infrastructure. Some of our larger application servers (SAP Hana) are possibly staying on VMWare if SAP won't support them on Hyper-V. This summer sucked big time but we'll make it.
- farseer 11mo agoI think the following quote summarizes Broadcom's strategy with regards to VMWare: "If you are a Global 2000 company, VMware wants your business — from the rest, not so much,” [1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/4053783/broadcoms-vmware-strategy-pays-off-financially-but-customers-not-as-keen-as-wall-street.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/4053783/broadcoms-vmwar...
- tiffanyh 11mo agoWhat’s next best alternative (regardless of cost)? Virtualbox Parallel Hyper-V Anything else? Which is best?
- jwithington 11mo agoThat's the $XXM question.
- zamadatix 11mo agoHard to say much given we weren't given much info on how it'd be used. E.g. Parallel's is only useful for people looking to run VMs locally on their Mac, but Hyper-V can be anything from that for a Windows PC to a full-blown headless hypervisor cluster with HA, shared volumes, replication, etc. For several of the common categories, these are my takes: - Traditional Enterprise: Nutanix [paid] if money is available, otherwise Hyper-V [paid] if a large Microsoft contract is already in place. If neither fit: fall through to acting like an SMB. - SMB/Modern Mid-Sized Enterprise: Cloud [paid] only and/or Proxmox [free/paid] - Tech Company: Doesn't matter, they'll do whatever sounds cool that year and make it work well enough - Home Lab: Proxmox [free/paid] - Windows PC: Hyper-V [free w/ Windows] (it's meh, but it's integrated - doubly so if you plan on using WSL on the side). - Mac PC: Parallels [paid] if you need a GPU accelerated Windows guest, UTM [free] otherwise. - Linux PC: QEMU+KVM [free], the choice of (optional) GUI client is up to preference. Some extra notes by solution: - Nutanix: Enterprises were staring to use this more and more even prior to the VMware sale. It's definitely the spiritual successor of traditional VMware usage in the data center. A bit less full of themselves, for now at least, than VMware ever managed to keep themselves (IMO). - Proxmox: Has a bit of a habit of feeling like it always ends up a little broken by the time you've used an install/cluster for 6 months, but is by far the best option for the homelabber type use case (even ignoring that it's free as a reason). It's basically like someone configured KVM with what you want to be able to just (try to) use it without thinking about what's underneath, while still having access to the underneath to un-stick it in certain situations. Also does host-native containers! I never did have the guts to pitch my company try to run anything production on a cluster, but they do have reasonably priced support plans and advanced feature tiers for that. - Parallels: Kind of sucks for the price, but there isn't anything else on macOS with the same GPU acceleration for Windows. - Hyper-V: I think this is mostly still around because it helps Microsoft stay sticky at companies when the yearly renewal comes up. That said, it's alright - and it's also integrated into Windows in some pretty nifty ways for local use these days. - UTM: Fantastic QEMU client for macOS, worth giving a few bucks for even though it's free.
- Nux 11mo agoMicrosoft gaining the most I reckon. Kind of sad seeing businesses getting screwed by closed source proprietary software, then making the same choices all over again. Nutanix also seeing huge demand. Not everyone is repeating their mistakes, with Proxmox and Xcp-ng seeing huge new level of business, as well, which is nice. I'm part of the Apache CloudStack project and that too is seeing unparalleled levels of demand. The KVM hypervisor has sort of become the de facto choice, thanks to virt-v2v tool which can help migrate VMware guests.
- ohdeardear 11mo ago[flagged]
- linsomniac 11mo agoCurious, I ditched our last VMWare servers ~a decade ago for KVM (via ganeti) for 100-200VMs running our dev, stg, and production loads, and it's been super reliable.
- ohdeardear 11mo agoIt's not curious at all; your workload was probably easy. The same program can crash constantly on one piece of _correct_ hardware, while working fine on a different piece of hardware. I was torturing the hardware and KVM wasn't designed to do that, until about two years ago.
- tstrimple 11mo agoI'm seeing a fucking ton of cloud migrations to Azure and AWS from VMware. Even cloud VMs are pretty cheap compared to Broadcom licensing.
- Todd_B 11mo agoA mix of Proxmox and Hyper-V. Also, Apache CloudStack using KVM.
- sokoloff 11mo agoBroadcom turned up the heat on our pot fast enough that we’re evacuating over to proxmox. I and several others in IT had run it at home for a while, so when Broadcom made the definite losses to continue on VMWare far higher than the likely losses from any migration outage, it became a no-brainer to migrate. Migrating part of the farm and A/B testing shows good results and we’ll be able to complete it in-place before the next pizzo payment to Broadcom is due. Thanks for the nudge, Broadcom! As far as I’m concerned, Broadcom and Oracle are tied for first on my “do not voluntarily do business with” list. Equaling Oracle in this way is a feat…
- bluGill 11mo agoI place Broadcom higher. At least Oracle seems to want customers that pay. I can't find evidence that of Broadcom wanting customers.
- polski-g 11mo agoThe CEO explicitly said the only customers they're interested in is the 600 customers who are responsible for 80% of their revenue. The are actively trying to shed all others; it's simply not worth the overhead costs otherwise.
- anakaine 11mo agoThat's one way to do business. Run tour product into obscurity so there are few qualified managers and admins in the market after 10 years, and everyone has become familiar with cheaper and now more prevalent alternatives. slow clap
- judahmeek 11mo agoReminds me of the saying that business's are either sowing or reaping investments. Broadcom definitely seems to be in a reaping stage.
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- protocolture 11mo agoProduction: Hyper V Dev: Proxmox
- xd1936 11mo agoNon-Profit Liberal Arts Higher Ed here. Trying to move to the Azure Hybrid Cloud as fast as possible. Going to have to eat one more year of 170% price hike in our current VMware contract. Heard from a peer school on the east coast that had to sign a 600% hike in their most recent contract. Absolutely evil.
- ohdeardear 11mo ago[flagged]
- jesterson 11mo agoI would not call it evil. Orgs are _voluntarily_ making the choice to lock in for expensive useless proprietary software by either being stupid or - actually evil - receiving kickbacks from those proprietary companies. Every manager signing off the contract with vendor lock in should understand possible repercussions. Its not a rocket science. Yep they will screw you along the way with prices. Yea, that sales rep saying they won't is a lying bastard that can't care ess about your business the moment your pen raised from your signature in contract. But people still believe in tales aren't they
- xd1936 11mo agoI understand all of that. We made a calculated risk, sure... back in 2007, and we've been happy to pay since. Only now, in one year, do the screws turn so tightly. But at least shareholder value is going up somewhere.
- owenthejumper 11mo agoI work for a vendor covering subset of functionality from VMware. I am seeing Nutanix the most, then Proxmox, Openshift. For some sub products, Avi is often going to HAproxy, Aria to a combination of Terraform, Datadog (and others)
- neoCrimeLabs 11mo agoWe're driving as many apps as possible to containers, and replacing most of our virtual infrastructure with Talos Linux [1] which is a reasonably hardened OS dedicated to Kubernetes hosting. I strongly recommend using the terraform provider to help manage at scale. The docs seem a little sparse for beginners, but if you already know kubernetes concepts, it's pretty easy to pick up. If you know flux style gitups talhelper+sops is far better than naked talosctl. We're also trying to migrate off of IAAS provided kubernetes and migrate to talos within instances. It's an effort to reduce dependency on specific IAAS while also minimizing number of technologies we need to support. We're driving anything that cannot be containerized to lift and shift to IAAS and forcing the app owners to pay for it out of their budget as motivation to modernize. They have to explain to the board why their spending increased and they are still on legacy. - [1] - https://www.talos.dev/ https://www.talos.dev/
- ohdeardear 11mo ago[flagged]
- neoCrimeLabs 11mo agoThat's not the word I'd use. I might say when they have an opinion on something it can be very specific.
- stego-tech 11mo agoAt PriorCo, I did a slide deck presentation of our options at the time (2023/2024) and pitched essentially three pathways: stay on VMware, move to Apache Cloudstack, or move to Nutanix. The deck was roundly ignored in favor of a lift-and-shift to AWS for remaining infrastructure. If I were running the migration, my preferred pathway would’ve been to Apache Cloudstack. We had the expertise to pull it off, and it would’ve freed us from vendor partners. Nutanix was really only on the list purely from its technology portfolio; its lack of profitability and shifting towards SaaS for features like cost analysis meant that we’d be moving into a similarly bad situation as VMware at the time (wholly beholden to their business priorities instead of our own), which I didn’t care for. There’s a lot of options out there, most of which are built atop either KVM/QEMU or OpenStack. Virtuozzo’s offerings impressed me, but the lack of a “comprehensive” product was a turnoff. Oxide was incredibly interesting from a simplicity and integration perspective, but the appetite wasn’t there to try a startup’s product. Microsoft and Oracle were both ruled out due to higher costs and more onerous licensing than VMware/Broadcom, while IBM/OpenShift were ruled out as our private cloud estate was 100% VMs with only ~20% of our internal products capable of containerization support. The biggest advice I can give is to understand your workload today, and determine options accordingly. Everyone’s pitching K8s and containers, but if your estate is majority VMs, then a lot of those options just aren’t worthwhile.
- MaKey 11mo agoWhat's the reason for not considering Proxmox?
- garganzol 11mo agoMy 2 cents: Proxmox is too rigid. For example: 1. Proxmox cannot even join a network using DHCP requiring manual IP configuration. 2. Disk encryption is a hell instead of checkbox in installer 3. Wi-Fi - no luck (rarely used for real servers, but frequently for r&d racks) Of course, it is a Debian core underneath and a lot of things are possible given enough time and persistence, but other solutions have them out of the box.
- 11mo ago
- OldfieldCTO 11mo ago#1 reason people don't wholesale move off of VMW is 1 word, RISK. Too much risk to move legacy applications of enterprises without a lengthy project to move. This that do and start to, are choosing KVM variants, RH Open shift Virt, or Hyper-V. Promos would be good if it had enterprise support. Nutanix is just as expensive and also a locked in option.
- ohdeardear 11mo agoI hate virtualization with a passion, because it's just more crap that doesn't work written by people that shouldn't touch computers. In theory, it's great. In practice, if you need to get "support" from someone else, it's not so great anymore, as all these companies have been discovering. I would use VM technology if whoever wrote it would provide me with a contract saying that if anyone were to find just one program that would crash their VM (while not crashing a real machine) or miscompute, that I would get a billion dollars. To answer your question: I was smart enough to never use it in the first place.
- garganzol 11mo agoThe only kind of person who would say that they hate virtualization is a hardware vendor. Because of conflict of interests. In this light, Broadcom, a hardware vendor, who buys a popular virtualization product does a "smart" move - it supposedly eliminates the very thing that eats away their profits. But it only looks smart to the vendor itself. For everyone else, the move looks unprofessional and incompetent.
- ohdeardear 11mo agoI never sold hardware, so there is that. I am rather anal about correctness and virtualization products are really complicated and as such almost nobody gets them to work reliably (if there is just one known bug, it's trash, IMO).
- garganzol 11mo agoHyper-V and Windows Server 2025. It ticks all the boxes, except being BigScaryCorp for some people.
- s3rv3rsi7e 11mo agoMost of the time I don't need a full VM and run inside a container via systemd-nspawn. This runs on the existing kernel instance but isolates everything nicely. Mainly use it for complex builds so they don't bork my system.
- cookiengineer 11mo agoCheck out libvirtd based stacks, because that's what's supported by upstream Linux. Some shops here migrate to proxmox as a UI because of certification requirements, but I migrated some of my customers to cockpit dashboard, and some to kubernetes. It's always a matter of scale and provisioning requirements. Cockpit is my favorite so far because it's easy to setup, but its focus isn't cluster scale, which is what most larger companies need. You have to setup basically two cockpit variants: the webui and lots of cockpit server daemons (aka libvirtd on remote machines). The webui then uses SSH to login to other machines to manage them (e.g. via the known_hosts file on the webui server). [3] Proxmox is pretty old and Perl, but it's doable. Usually storage clustering is a bit painful because you need something on a filesystem layer like ceph clusters. There's also openshift but no idea if that is an IBM/RedHat lock-in as well, so the SMEs didn't want that risk. [1] https://cockpit-project.org/ https://cockpit-project.org/ [2] https://www.proxmox.com/en/ https://www.proxmox.com/en/ [3] https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/feature-machines.html https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/feature-machines.ht...
- throwaway270925 11mo agoCockpits SSH/multiple machines feature is being deprecated though unfortunately
- lconnell962 11mo agoI've just enjoyed the realization that I attended a meeting where our VMware support rep used "Just think about how much money using bare metal hardware is costing" as an argument to my management during that meeting after these price increases were becoming common news.
- vaxman 11mo agoFor Mac/Linux/Hybrid-Cloud shops -> "Incus" (can also host macOS and Windows instances) for most work and "Firecracker" for specialized appliances. For Windows shops (you sick bstrds :D) -> Hyper-V RE: Proxmox, not a hater, but errtime I read that name, I picture "Mike Myers Dieter". Seriously tho, the best they could do for themselves would be to make ProxMox into a UI for the Incus REST API (and their legacy backend) then repackage their enterprise offerings as add-ons for Incus (for email, DRS, etc.) BTW, the first person to release an "I use this exclusively everyday for months before releasing it on Github" gesture-controlled WebGL/Audio and WebXR based UX with agentic Incus REST API sensor analysis and settings controls, will win a valuable prize. https://aws.plainenglish.io/why-even-google-is-rethinking-kubernetes-internally-a4c457252450 https://aws.plainenglish.io/why-even-google-is-rethinking-ku... -> Mind earlier warnings that many people in the Industry these days tend to follow each other around on forums creating a sort of "feedback loop" so bad trends (eg, PHP) takeover the game. <cue https://youtu.be/uPWQfAv_qBQ https://youtu.be/uPWQfAv_qBQ>
- vaxman 11mo ago| | ----> The World of Incus -> https://youtu.be/TzH2L5Bzlh8 https://youtu.be/TzH2L5Bzlh8
- tdr2d 11mo agoHi, im a presales engineer for OVHcloud, a cloud provider. OVH is a "pinacle" VMware partner, we are a huge reseller of VMware licenses, and were able to secure a 3-5 years contract with broadcom with only 5 to 15% of price increase. Of course, the clients I talk with are mostly interested in moving to the cloud or are already in the cloud, so it won't be applicable to you if you'd stay on-prem. I wanted to share my experience. For some clients, change of technology would be more expensive than paying a bit more to VMware. You'd have to re-train half your IT department, and the migration could be long, risky and complexe. So in this case, a lift and shift move-to-cloud can be competitive, and frankly a serious option. I see a lot of projects with Nutanix, but you'd be surprise of the price, which is almost the same as VMware. Nutanix comes with way more features than vanilla vsphere which explains the cost increase. You'd have NSX and vSAN packaged, plus replication features. Nutanix offers a great alternative. Actually, OVH proposes Nutanix too, so we can be agnostic and have a sort of leverage over Broadcom. Some clients are ok to move to public cloud (equivalent AWS/Azure..). The smaller the infra the easier it is. It can be very cheap at OVH. Also it's great if you do containers because of the universal nature of them, they are easy to migrate. However, If the client has a lot of Windows Server, the cost is actually higher (at OVH the price of the Windows Server Licence is higher than at Azure..) because we cannot leverage the Windows Datacenter licenses The cheapest viable option is to go to Proxmox on Baremetal servers. The features are close to a standard vSphere environnement. The lack of enterprise support is the thing that stops most clients to do this move.
- anakaine 11mo agoAll good points, except perhaps the cost of the move. With VMWare licences anecdotallty increasing ~8x, the cost of moving could well be recovered quite quickly. Organisations tend to think and react strategically, and this will mean 3-5 year (or more) financial projections for major projects. If a $1m VMWare annual bill is now $8m, over 5 years thats $5m vs $40m. A change to a $1m annually cluster isn't going to cost you $35m, so you should definitely look at changing to minimise your expenses, assuming you get the support etc that you need elsewhere.
- incomingpain 11mo agoBroadcom ruined vmware for me. Seems to me everyone is going to Proxmox, Xen, or hyperv. Honourable mention but technically apples to oranges. Kubernetes and docker. Redhat openshift? I have never heard of anyone trying to go to it. I like how they try to mix vms and containers... but i dunno it seems to suffer from the standard red hat problem.
- rwmj 11mo agoI gave a lightning talk about virt-v2v, VMware and Red Hat at DevConf last year. It's online at https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/ https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/
- opensourse_ram 11mo ago[dead]
- sharts 11mo agoUnfortunately there are effectively 0 alternatives to VMware / Parallels if wanting to do MacOS within MacOS.
- stephenr 11mo agoDon't a bunch of the newer tools that wrap Virtualization.Framework (which itself wraps/builds on the lower level Hypervisor.framework) already support this? There's even an example project to do this in code: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/running-macos-in-a-virtual-machine-on-apple-silicon https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
- mindcrash 11mo agoHappily want to give some options: * DIY w/ KVM/Xen * DIY w/ OpenStack - https://www.openstack.org/ https://www.openstack.org/ * ProxMox - https://www.proxmox.com/en/ https://www.proxmox.com/en/ * Paid OpenStack through one of their partners - https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/consulting/ https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/consulting/ * OpenNebula - https://opennebula.io/ https://opennebula.io/ * Nutanix - https://www.nutanix.com/ https://www.nutanix.com/ If you want a solution that "just works", is simple to manage and can even extend to public cloud infrastructure when needed I can really, really recommend Nutanix. Migrating from VMWare is also really simple, they have a tool which makes that very easy. Do note that they use a heavily modified KVM as hypervisor.
- RagnarD 11mo agoXCP-ng and XCP-ng Center are excellent no-cost solutions. It can't do highest end VMware functions such as the voodoo of moving a running system to a different VM with no interruptions, but it can do a lot.
- aborsy 11mo agoProxmox is a pretty solid alternative!
- dabockster 11mo agoDepends on what VMware product you’re using. I’m still stuck on Workstation Pro because Hyper-V takes over my computer and slows down anything virtualized that isn’t Windows. For servers, there’s things like Proxmox that are super versatile and can be deployed to a 1U server in a few hours. And if whatever you’re virtualizing exists mostly in the application/user layer and doesn’t touch lower level APIs (eg raw TCP), Docker/Portainer is even better (no Kubernates required!).