VMWare alternatives | TheaterFire

We're running POCs with Apache CloudStack and OpenNebula. Mostly the integrate with our terraform / pulumi tools nicely and to "align" with our AWS strategy when it comes to EC2. Both are working well but we'll probably end up on ACS.

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ScaleNinja@reddit

CloudStack’s ftw!

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Radiant-Phase4098@reddit

I guess I’ll add a different voice: my requirements are not as aggressive as many others’ and we’ve been using raw Ubuntu LTS managed with a large collection of Ansible playbooks for a decade, and we manage all our (windows and Linux) VMs with plain old boring libvirt. And to be clear, it garners absolutely no complaints from any of our staff. It just works, does its job flawlessly, and is “good enough” unless you have extreme requirements. At least consider it a “lower brow” option to proxmox and friends that does well enough for most complex (automation) use cases we have that don’t need 6 nines of availability.

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Ontological_Gap@reddit

How do manage auto fail over and shared storage for the VM images? Are you running ceph?

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Radiant-Phase4098@reddit

Sorry! Was out of pocket for a while. So I’m general, I’m keeping it as vanilla as I can. I have used ceph, and also straight boring nfs to house the storage, but ceph is preferable (just a bit more complex to maintain). I have had good results with migration of VMs from one operating system instance to another, much like the features in both VMware and hyperv, but it’s generally simpler and has fewer knobs to tweak. Again, good enough for most smaller business use cases and most large businesses ones if you’re willing to invest some time to explore and experiment with the full feature set. I peculiarly love how simple it is to automate everything with libvirt. That’s our real bread and butter. I run a test range, so I need random arbitrary VMs that all look a bit different, not normally conducive to automation, but I’m injecting carefully chosen payloads and devices into each vm and libvirt really does shine here…

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

I have noticed that I need almost nothing that VMWare provides. HV has enough, and more.

Given that I have the licenses already, I'm not inclined to go below that, but I do appreciate and agree with your position. Good enough is good enough.

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Ontological_Gap@reddit

Libvirt is strictly greater than hyperv, not below it

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Routine_Ad7935@reddit

I have seen a mayor drawback on HyperV compared to vSphere ESXi...no native multiple connection to console of VMs....yeah..you can use VNC or similar....but that is not native... Proxmox has the capability to use multiple Connection to a VM console.

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NetworkNerd_@reddit

If this is strictly about cost, think also about the cost of researching other options in enough detail to see if they will work for you, the cost of other licensing and support you would need for an alternative solution, and the cost in labor hours of your time to learn the new solution and perform the switch.

While this is a small environment, my initial thought is that the cost of these factors could potentially be far more than doing the renewal and focusing on a different project.

If the amount of the renewal isn’t small to your company, then ok. Based on the information you have given I just wonder if it’s really worth making a change trying to look at it from a dollars and cents perspective. Try stepping back and putting all that on a spreadsheet.

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ben_zachary@reddit

If you want something similar to vsan , hyperv with the new storage is close. While prox does it too they use 50% vs 33%. For us weve been moving most clients to proxmox they are smaller with 1-3 hosts and san storage.

Our datacenter is 7 hosts 130ish vms with 100tb of vsan which is about 76tb usable. Cutting that to 50tb with prox seemed to much to cut so we are staging hyperV across 5 hosts . We are mostly windows with about 15 Linux vms so seems reasonable but proxmox would be our primary go-to

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pmbasehore@reddit

We're starting a POC for OpenShift by RedHat. So far it's been absolutely fantastic!

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Csaba12343@reddit

what storage are you using?

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pmbasehore@reddit

Pure, mainly

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Csaba12343@reddit

thank you. i will try out some ibm storwize v7000gen2 with csi driver. vmware prices are nort 500k€…

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pmbasehore@reddit

We do have some IBM as well; they're solid products. We just use them for things other than VM storage, so I can't really tell you how well they do or do not work with OpenShift.

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Csaba12343@reddit

will report back once the install finished

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lifeonbroadway@reddit

Starwind V2V Converter to convert them to Hyper-V. Easy money

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benuntu@reddit

Starwind V2V works well, but lately I've been using the Instant Recovery feature in Veeam. You can sign up for a trial version of the entire suite for 30 days, which is more than enough time to install and connect to your hypervisor environment(s). Once that is done you just right click on a VM and hit "Instant Recovery" and say where you want that VM restored to. I've found it's 3x faster than V2V.

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JustCallMeBigD@reddit

This is how I moved us from VMware to Hyper-V, too. We already had Veeam though. Super easy.

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KillingTime1212@reddit

Are your Hyper-V hosts connected to domain? That’s my biggest gripe. Want separate admin credentials for my hypervisors.

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JustCallMeBigD@reddit

Yes, for reasons.

BUT

I alone personally have local admin accounts, and only my MSP's and my domain account are permitted to log in.

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lifeonbroadway@reddit

Interesting, will have to make a note of this for the future.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Forgot about that tool.

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lifeonbroadway@reddit

I think we all do, until we get that VMWare renewal quote!

I always recommend because it saved my ass in my first year as a sys admin.

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Inevitable-Star2362@reddit

My opinion is proxmox or if you need something with a larger vender behind it HPE VM Essentials which is socket based licenses and cheap.

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NoEstablishment9123@reddit

HPE Morpheus vm essentials looks interesting on a paper and the license cost is less than 1k per cpu.

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FatBook-Air@reddit

How big are these 8 VMs? That seems small to use VMware even when it was reasonably priced, much less at $14,000.

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mvbighead@reddit

Yep. The only thing that makes sense there is the Essentials pack which was 3 hosts and VC for around $5000. 8 VMs? HyperV and be done with it.

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Stonewalled9999@reddit

they no longer offer Essentials - which is a shame we had some small sites using it. The whole "you need to pay for 48 cores (?) per host and use VCF" made those sites move to hyper-V.

Same with a site using the VC STD and 100 VM Robo license the support WAS 17K a year, the new Broadcom screw me price was over 500K a year.

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narcissisadmin@reddit

I'll never understand why the fuck they did that.

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Ferretau@reddit

Because they only want the top 1% of whales using their product - everybody else can go jump as far as they are concerned - too expensive paying for the support you need to provide and eats into the pure profit they want to see.

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Jhamin1@reddit

Crazy thing? This sounds like a cynical IT guy ranting, but it is the literal truth. They gave a presentation laying out this plan to investors in 2021

They said they would do exactly what they are doing.

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Ferretau@reddit

Precisely, they did the same thing with Symantec AV

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reverendjb@reddit

That was the essentials+, the essentials license was 3 hosts for ~$600/year. Very reasonable for a small deployment.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Not that big. It started when everything was in-house, but we moved off-site faster than we moved to VMs, so...

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Ontological_Gap@reddit

OpenShift virtualization Engine is what you want. Everything just works and you get to benefit from the big players investments in kube

Proxmox like, barely, works with storage arrays.

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thunderbird32@reddit

Isn't OpenShift for an environment the size of OP's kind-of like using a nuclear bomb to kill a rat?

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Ontological_Gap@reddit

A price-competitive nuclear bomb!

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Thanks for the info!

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BudTheGrey@reddit

You did not mention the brand/model/age/general spec of the existing quipment, so I'll presume it's relatively current and compatible. If all of the VMs are windows, and any new VMs for the foreseeable future also be Windows, then probably HyperV. But for that number of VM's, Proxmox is a very viable candidate.

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thunderbird32@reddit

so I'll presume it's relatively current and compatible

Hope they don't have a fiber-channel SAN. From all the research I've been doing Proxmox's support for them is incredibly lacking. Our Alletra SAN is barely a year old, so we're not buying more hardware just to go to Proxmox. So, even though our Windows/Linux ratio is basically 50/50 we're probably stuck going to Hyper-V.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

3 years old. It's good for another few years - long enough that I can move everything off with what I have.

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Locodegreee@reddit

Not enough love for Svale Computing for a dead simple - just works hyperconverged solution.

They have the BEST support of any vendor I've ever contacted if something does go wrong or you have any question.

I've done a few dozen vmware to scale migrations and never had any issues.

Couple of those clients have been on scale for 4ish years at this point and no issues other than routine part swaps.

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Evening_Link4360@reddit

For only 8 VM’s, you should consider cloud. Or Hyper-V.

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OkEssay4173@reddit

I have 10 servers on another site, we are going with physical servers for that. That's how expensive vmware is now :/

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Both, actually. We're moving most things to the cloud already, but 5 years to get it all there. And looks like HV is the winner.

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coolbeaNs92@reddit

5 years for 8 VMs?

There was a guy on here who's moving 10k VMs in like 8 months 😂

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

It's not the VMs. It's the systems already in place that simply won't move to the cloud. We're replacing them one at a time. Taking our time to be sure we do it right.

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coolbeaNs92@reddit

Wish I had those kinda timescales!

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WraithYourFace@reddit

I moved to Scale Computing about 2 years ago. Rock solid so far. 3 HC hosts with about 25 VMs.

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GullibleDetective@reddit

I dont have the pricing files but nutanix is fast but has weird bugs and isn't mature with backup vendor integration

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SoonerMedic72@reddit

I thought I saw they had Veeam?

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GullibleDetective@reddit

They do. But enterprise manager doesn't read nutanix backups, vspc doesn't integrate wrll

There's tons of issues and an ongoing case where guest processing between vlans (crossing vpcs) even witb windows networking, all firewalls, pings just doesnt work

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techguyjason@reddit

And it isn't supported by Aruba. We have nutanix but had to spin up hyper-v for clearpass and mobility conductor.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Thanks. Good to know.

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GullibleDetective@reddit

To elaborate, you cannot edit virtual subnets once they go into prod, you have to delete and redo them

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Oof.

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RyanLewis2010@reddit

XCO-NG and Xen Orchestra is as close as you can get to VMware replacement feature wise. It’s open source and Vates has been doing a great job at improving it and providing top tier business support.

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nosimsol@reddit

What do you think of Proxmox vs XCP-NG?

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RyanLewis2010@reddit

Different type of Hypervisors i still think proxmox is a great home lab but i don’t think it should be in a large to medium sized businesses. I just don’t think it’s quite ready for the enterprise yet.

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ZPrimed@reddit

Tell that to Nutanix. They are just KVM on top of Linux too, same as Proxmox. Big difference is that Nutanix has "special sauce" in their storage layer. Proxmox has either ZFS, or Linux LVM raid (eew), or Ceph, which I've heard can be good but can also be rather fragile and temperamental. IME, Nutanix storage actually works pretty well.

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nosimsol@reddit

Why? Not trying to be difficult. I will be moving off of hyper-v in a year or two and moving to either xcp-ng or proxmox, so I am curious.

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RyanLewis2010@reddit

For me, it’s probably just the same reason as using UniFi in a large enterprise company. While I love UniFi and I do use it in my medium sized business. If I had the budget of a large company, I wouldn’t even think about it because I would have the manpower and equipment budget to afford the more expensive stuff. And it’s not that it’s bad it’s that the failure rate is marginally higher however, when you’re running 10x the equipment of a small business, it means you have 10x the failures.

Now to think about the hypervisor, you have this relative newcomer to the field. They’ve only offered a limited support for like a year or two and it has not been stretched out to hundreds of nodes as many times as VMware or XCP-NG or hyperV have so there are probably quite a few edge cases that are still to be found.

Now, as all these new homelabers come into the enterprise field out of college I do see proxmox making more of an enterprise push provided that they can get the developer and support behind it.

So TLDR; do you want to be the first one in the parade navigating all the obstacles or do you want to be the one a few hundred people back learning from the guy in the front?

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BarracudaDefiant4702@reddit

I think you underestimate the proxmox deployments. It's been deployed way more on larger networks than XCP-NG from what I can tell.

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RyanLewis2010@reddit

Yes but how many? Maybe 10-100 100+ node deployments? Just because it’s been done once doesn’t mean all the headaches are flushed out.

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Horsemeatburger@reddit

Edit: I’m sorry have you not heard of Citrix Xenserver? That is what XCP-NG is, Vates picked up the open source of it and rebranded it.

I have, we had the misfortune of being stuck with a large cluster going from XS 4 to XS 7. Because even back then the platform was shit. Lots of annoying issues, bugs and random problems which made life difficult. Although the fact that Citrix support was mostly useless didn't help, either.

Ever wondered why Citrix suddenly made XS7 open source? Because VMware was eating their lunch left, right and center. XS 7 was at least two generations behind ESXi, and this was back in 2017. Citrix tried to get more interest in their dead-end hypervisor. Turned out that it didn't create interest from people who were willing to pay for the premium version, so they removed the open source option.

Vates picked up the open source of it and rebranded it.

Indeed. Because they were the only ones who had any interest in it. Because everyone else could see that it's a technological liability.

Even Citrix sells what's now renamed to Citrix Hypervisor as add-on for their other product and don't invest many resources for its development.

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BarracudaDefiant4702@reddit

I am familiar with Xenserver and XCP-NG and from what I can tell, Proxmox has been used in a lot more and for a lot larger clusters. My deployment isn't huge, as it's 49 pve nodes and just under 1k vms (3/49 of the nodes mainly running PBS and a couple other vms and almost not worth counting as the are basically backup infrustructure). I know of at least a couple cloud providers with over 1000 nodes running proxmox, and several companies with 100+ nodes. There is easily well over 10 100+node deployments, but I don't personally know if it would exceed 100 large deployments, but surprised if not.

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Horsemeatburger@reddit

Now to think about the hypervisor, you have this relative newcomer to the field.

I wouldn't call KVM a newcomer. KVM has been around since 2007 and been part of the mainline Linux kernel since 2007. It's the most widely used hypervisor on the planet and powers the majority of all public cloud infrastructure.

We run several clusters of which some have more than 100 hosts and thousands of VMs, all on KVM.

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Horsemeatburger@reddit

I agree with Proxmox not being great for enterprise use, however this is even more true for XCP-ng (which is essentially a fork of XenServer 7).

At least Proxmox is based on current tech (KVM), which is the most widely supported virtualization platform. It's part of the Linux kernel and used by all the big names like RHEL, Oracle, AWS, Google and others.

XCP-ng is based on XEN, which was one of the first hypervisors but which has been abandoned by all its large supporters almost a decade ago for KVM. The little development that still happens is minuscule, also considering that the last major version came out in 2010. XCP-ng itself has inherited all the annoyances which back in 2017 made XenServer 7 such a poor competitor to ESXi. The tech stack it's based on is ancient (Dom0 is still based on CentOS 7) and it has inherited all the problems that plagued XenServer (like the random errors during coalesce). Last I heard, they finally have a solution for the 2TB limit for vdisks in Beta.

The main difference here is that Proxmox can focus on the management stack since the underlying hypervisor and OS is actively developed by others, while the vendor behind XCP-ng (Vates) has to deal with what's a top-to-bottom tech stack that's largely obsolete. Which probably explains why progress has been forthcoming at a snail's pace.

With Proxmox, at if it doesn't work for you then it's really easy to transfer VMs to another KVM based platform.

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Hour_Preparation2670@reddit

XCP-NG also uses Xen 4.19, nested virtualisation is broken in 8.3 and so on and such.

That platform should in its current state never be installed in any production environment.

It has been abandoned.

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Hour_Preparation2670@reddit

Oh and it is not like I like Proxmox either.

They took all the good stuff from LXC and chugged it to frankenstein their "you can run containers AND vms mind blown"

The containers are full containers, which means they run their own full systems - nothing at all like the containers you are used to.

You cannot migrate them from host to host easily. No GUI for it either.

And IF and I say IF Proxmox was elegant they would converge all their things into containers (per their philosophy) - so why is their Ceph and such not containerised.

It also lacks a native multipath iSCSI-driver which makes it nigh on impossible to run in enterprise unless you are a masochist.

Oh and don't get me started on the brittleness of the corosync.

One thing I do like is the SQLITE-fusefs they have implemented, that is pretty clever.

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AdInevitable8483@reddit

For enterprise we must go for XCP NG

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Hour_Preparation2670@reddit

Proxmox does not use client-side verification, so that is a win.

And it is KVM.

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Linuxmonger@reddit

Another vote for XCP-ng.

As for reasons, it feels very similar to VMware, and it's easier to sell to management, it has great support, and more development time on enterprise grade hardware.

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AdInevitable8483@reddit

100% agree its amazing.us8ng it for years with q00+ VMs

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Thanks.

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Squeezer999@reddit

Hyperv

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The-BruteSquad@reddit

Proxmox for the win.

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shimoheihei2@reddit

I'm a big fan of Proxmox, and helped a lot of companies move to it. At your size, it would probably be a breeze to make the move.

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Miamichris127@reddit

Prox

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Vichingo455@reddit

Hyper-V isn't that bad. You get it with Windows Server so maybe use that.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Probably will. Thanks.

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uninspiredalias@reddit

I moved us to Hyper-V not too long ago. It wasn't too painful.

If you don't have a clear migration path lined up, I recommend Veeam...it made the process so easy.

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bmoreitdan@reddit

Hate this answer all you want, but as a Linux guy, I choose KVM/QEMU/Libvirtd on RHEL/Rocky all day. There’s a little learning and some minor scripting, but I like how slim it is. Minimal Linux install, add Cockpit and libvirt. Done.

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Velvet_Samurai@reddit

We rolled out our first ProxMox host last year and it's been great. I was very wary, but there hasn't been a single issue, it's really great.

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nosimsol@reddit

What are you running for specs? How many vm's? What do you use for backup?

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Velvet_Samurai@reddit

The proxmox has 10 VM's but about half of them are personal sandboxes for users, then I have a new DC in there, we have some API server for oracle, our oracle test environment is there, and I have a small file server with unique settings for a certain team. I guess none of those are exactly full production uses. I use the built in proxmox backup tool with a USB hard drive hooked to the front.

My specs are 256GB of Memory with two 40 core sockets. It's extremely beefy for what we are using it for, I bought it refurbished just to test ProxMox out.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Thanks.

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Dave_A480@reddit

Proxmox is closer in capability to VMWare than HyperV... And free.

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CraftedPacket@reddit

Have a look at scale computing. Though they currently only support a minimum of 3 hosts for their hyper converged clusters. 2 host support is coming later this year. Its built on KVM but their storage layer is pretty interesting.

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LonelyWizardDead@reddit

Xcp-ng Proxmox Hyper-v

If you ms and cloud : hyper-v

If your on prem, I'd try xcp-ng But everyone will prob say proxmax But xcp-ng deserves a shout out

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loupgarou21@reddit

If you don't need anything special, Hyper-V would be my vote. I'm currently rolling out Scale, it's OK. It's fairly easy to get setup, user friendly, but I'm feeling a bit constrained by what appears to be a lack of configurability. That being said, I haven't gotten very far into using it.

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Expensive_Plant_9530@reddit

IMO for such a small scale setup, I would ditch VMWARE asap.

Hyper-V, Proxmox, HPE VM Essentials, Scale, you’ve got choice now. You may even be able to reuse your existing hardware in some of these cases too.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

That's what I'm thinking. Thanks.

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benuntu@reddit

This is what I did with my old VMware stack. Started with just 4 Hyper-V hosts, configured as a cluster, with the same hardware that was previously part of the VMWare desktop/Horizon VDI environment. Moved everything over and kept adding to the Hyper-V cluster.

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Legitimate-Form-2916@reddit

you might have operational headaches with HyperV ngk

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AdInevitable8483@reddit

With hyperv there are license also management of windows. Security...high hypervisor resource usage. Would never recommend wi down for anything rock solid and stable.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

I have the resources. Box was overbuilt for the original load, which we've reduced the past few years.

And I have the licenses, and the experience.

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THE_Ryan@reddit

Hyper-V. Especially if you already know it. For such a small workload, no reason to break the bank or experiment with Proxmox or XCP (XCP isn't prod ready IMO).

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Thanks.

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AdInevitable8483@reddit

Proxmox is best choice. Free no license no OS overhead. Best performance

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AdInevitable8483@reddit

Go for xcp-ng already using it rock solid. You might have to give up some IO performance but stability is rock solid. Extremely well performance balancing. Proxmox is good choice but only if you need all or every single performance boost but at cost of shared resource burst.. specially disk IO.

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AnythingGuilty5411@reddit

Like everyone has said. 2 hosts screams hyper v… BUT always ask questions first. What does the workload look like/need?

You’ve chosen to explore hyper v. Design it right first. Cater it to your environment. Do not go step by step in setting it up by figuring it out. Design, plan, test, force fail it, and understand how it works, THEN move your production workload. Too many horror stories with this as a solutions architect.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Yep. Call on Monday with our local MSP. They've been doing a lot of these lately. :)

Fortunately, our workloads are fairly light - just legacy things that are difficult to move offsite. They'll get us straight.

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AnythingGuilty5411@reddit

Great answer. Make them do the little diagrams even if they’re corny. Also, if they are legacy apps, create a 3-5 year plan to move off of those applications (if even possible) so you can get rid of on-prem entirely. Or N-1 host redundancy with everything in Azure or whatever you use..

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Rodyadostoevsky@reddit

We were in a similar situation recently. 2 hosts, 25 VMs. The new quote for ESXi was 16k AFTER negotiation with a 3 year contract. This was in first week of March. Our renewal was April 5th. So we decided to just move to Proxmox and frankly, Proxmox is pretty good.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

I like to hear that.

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pdp10@reddit

If you're on perpetual VMware licensing, then you have a lot more options than if you aren't.

We migrated to KVM/QEMU a long time ago -- a thin layer of custom framework, leveraging NFS for shared datastores like VMware.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Oof - perpetual. I forgot about that. Need to dig out my stuff and see if I have options there.

MANY thanks!

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Horsemeatburger@reddit

Nutanix is the next best thing to vSphere, although pricing is now almost similar.

Hyper-V is the natural choice if your workloads are Windows Server.

Proxmox is a good alternative if you're looking for a all-in-one solution but I'd only consider it for smaller deployments.

Otherwise, KVM on Enterprise Linux (RHEL, Oracle Linux, Alma Linux, Rocky Linux) with OpenShift/OKD/OpenNebula is a great option especially for large deployments.

What I'd stay away from: - HPE Morpheus (essentially KVM with cloud management, unproven, and risky consideirng HPE's history with software) - XCP-ng (based on XEN which is now a legacy stack, essentially what XenServer 7 was 10 years ago, plus a truly glacial speed of development)

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johndevious@reddit

I tried HPE Morpheus community as a POC and wasn't very impressed with it. It's as if they took anything they could and smashed it together. It wasn't very user friendly. I never really got it to a point where I felt confident in it.

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Horsemeatburger@reddit

Sounds like your average HPE software product then.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Thanks for the comprehensive review. HyperV is probably is.

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GBICPancakes@reddit

I've defaulted to Proxmox for similar situations, even over Hyper-V. But both options work. I just find Proxmox to be more flexible and more reliable with network vSwitches, and is quicker/easier to patch than Windows hosts.

Still, either work fine. Screw VMWare. I carried their water for decades, but Broadcom killed that loyalty.

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Kind_Boot7659@reddit

Oh i see

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EngineerInTitle@reddit

One of our clients got a similar quote for 1 host, 6-ish vm's. Consolidated, moved to Azure, and we're moving them to Entra only accounts/devices. If they needed on-prem servers, we'd probably look at Hyper V

Broadcom is the worst.

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DreamArez@reddit

Proxmox, Hyper-V, or my beloved Scale.

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caramingo@reddit

About six months ago, I migrated around ten machines from VMware to a Proxmox server. I didn’t have to recreate the servers from scratch on Proxmox—I found a way to import them directly. The Linux servers worked without any issues, but I had to spend some time troubleshooting network configuration on the Windows machines.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Thanks.

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AfterEagle@reddit

I use both HyperV and Proxmox.

HyperV for all our MS stuff like Domain controller, SQL databases, licensing servers.

Proxmox for all the one-off web apps we run on dedicated Linux VMs. Home assistant. MQTT.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Thanks!

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WorldsWorstSysadmin@reddit

Proxmox

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valenx@reddit

ProxMox

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Sorry-Committee4443@reddit

We are moving to Proxmox, the support cost with a partner (optional) are about 5% from the VMWare cost. it's a no brainer

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InterestingMedium500@reddit

Proxmox

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Jeff-IT@reddit

I’m using Hyper-V

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Ape_Escape_Economy@reddit

Almost identical to you except 16 VMs.

We’re going hyper-v all the way.

What’s VMware giving me besides another renewal to track and another budgetary line item to justify?

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Exactly!

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JWK3@reddit

Does your business require your own physical hardware and hyper data locality? At that low scale I'd be looking at cloud hosting, either with a hyperscaler or a mid/large-sized MSP that have their own shared cloud platform.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

We still require some local assets, though we are moving as much to the cloud as possible.

I figure we'll fully migrate in about 5 years.

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johnyakuza0@reddit

Nutanix

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WolfetoneRebel@reddit

100% (if you can afford it).

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Stonewalled9999@reddit

pretty costly for 2 hosts 8VMs no ?

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johnyakuza0@reddit

They are flexible but you have to contact their support. Being a Nutanix partner helps a lot.

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THE_Ryan@reddit

Will cost as much, if not more than that 14K VMware renewal, but it is the best in feature parity.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Thanks. I've seen a lot of that recommended.

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h9xq@reddit

Hyper v and proxmox seem to be the best alternatives.

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

Thank you.

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theMightBoop@reddit

We are going back to hyper-V

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

I'm leaning....

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ITquestionsAccount40@reddit

Youll have to pry my hyper-v from my cold dead hands.

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IdiosyncraticBond@reddit

Not yet due until mid May? That's... checks calendar... only about 10 workday remaining until you have to have all migrated away? Might IMHO be a bit too much to ask if it also needs setting up and evaluating an alternative, plus the knowledge gap that comes with any new platform

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Reedy_Whisper_45@reddit (OP)

I came from a HyperV shop, and I have the licenses already... I may have to bite it this year, but now I know.