free open source hypervisor

Posted by chuck2kill@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 12 comments

Hello

I'm in a company where we run ovirt, and as the project seems to be in pause, we're looking for another solution, but we'd like something open source and free.

We keep an eye on openstack, but it seems too big for us.

we have around 30 hosts and 600 vms

Do you have any recommandations or idea?

thank you guys

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gopal_bdrsuite@reddit

Considering your current scale (30 hosts, 600 VMs) and desire for an open-source, free solution that is less complex than OpenStack but still provides enterprise features and scalability, I would strongly recommend focusing your evaluation on:

Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE): This is often the top choice for companies transitioning from proprietary solutions or even oVirt, seeking a highly functional, easy-to-manage, and cost-effective open-source virtualization platform. Its integrated nature and robust feature set for clustering, storage, and backup are very appealing. The availability of commercial support is a major plus for enterprise use.

XCP-ng / Xen Orchestra: This is a very strong second choice, especially if your team has any prior Xen experience or values the Xen hypervisor's specific characteristics. Xen Orchestra provides an excellent management experience that rivals proprietary solutions.

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ElevenNotes@reddit

Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE):

Has no shared block storage (if you use LVM, you can't do snapshots anymore 🤦🏻‍♂️)
Has no cluster file system
HCI needs 5 nodes (compared to other solutions that only need 2 or 3)
No DRS

XCP-ng

Can't have virtual disks larger than 2TB (yes, you can have multiple disks per VM, duh!)
Has no thin provsioned shared block storage
Has no cluster file system
No Veeam integration
No DRS

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roiki11@reddit

A bit pedantic but ceph is shared block storage. You can also do snapshots with zfs over iscsci(and probably nvme too).

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No_Advance_4218@reddit

Can't have virtual disks larger than 2TB (yes, you can have multiple disks per VM, duh!)

This is coming, or has already been added in 8.3. They have been working on QCOW2 for a while now. I dont know for sure if its in 8.3 yet as I dont personally run XCP-NG but I follow the project for future possible use.

https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2025/06/27/qcow2-in-xcp-ng-engineering-a-new-storage-path/

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Burgergold@reddit

For PVE, it can run with 3 nodes and with ceph bo?

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xXNorthXx@reddit

These are the biggest issues once you outgrow small business deployments.

Proxmox also lacks a fully implemented fleet management tool as well.

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roiki11@reddit

Proxmox, xcp-ng, cloudstack, opennebula, harvester are all open source alternatives.

It just depends what your needs are and what you're willing to do.

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virtualadept@reddit

Check out XCP-ng: https://xcp-ng.org/

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ElevenNotes@reddit

30 hosts and 600 vms

Any reason to chicken out on normal enterprise software for this workload? You can achieve only so much with OSS without having to hire absolute experts that can maintain and support the OSS; while anyone can maintain and support the enterprise app. If you have the inhouse expertise, you would not have to ask this question, since you would just use KVM with Ansible.

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It depends on your Hardware strategy..

What? Why?

If anything, it should be the other way around.