VMware Alternatives

[bullerwins]

I've been with XCP-ng for like 3 years as per Tom Lawrence recommnedation and I like it a bit more over Proxmox

 

[warllo]

We'll be sticking with VMware. The number of tools (HA with fail over is huge for us) and flexibility it provides us with is paramount. Veeam is simply the easiest backup solution and works great with Exchange, Office 365 and on-premise servers and tightly integrates with VMware. Supposedly Veeam is looking into adding support for Proxmox.

 

[nabsltd]

Does VMWare support live migration from 1 host server to another?

Not only does it support live migration of the running VM (i.e., RAM) between hosts, it supports live migration of VM storage between hosts.

So, you can have hosts that have local storage running ESXi and move running VMs between them, all without any kind of NAS or SAN.

 

[Arwen]

Not only does it support live migration of the running VM (i.e., RAM) between hosts, it supports live migration of VM storage between hosts.

So, you can have hosts that have local storage running ESXi and move running VMs between them, all without any kind of NAS or SAN.

Thanks for the confirmation.

That second part sounds neat, avoiding NAS or SAN storage. Though I've seen some VMWare hosts die unexpectedly, (hardware fault), which would have taken their VM's storage with the failed host. Can't bring up the VM on another host.

 

[nabsltd]

That second part sounds neat, avoiding NAS or SAN storage. Though I've seen some VMWare hosts die unexpectedly, (hardware fault), which would have taken their VM's storage with the failed host. Can't bring up the VM on another host.

I use it when I want to perform maintenance on a host where there are VMs that are redundant in some way (MySQL cluster, mail servers, etc.) and I generally run them on separate hosts. I move the VM temporarily to avoid log messages about cluster issues, and then move it back after maintenance. This is faster than moving the storage to SAN then to the new host.

Also, if the host completely died with vital VMs on the disks and you can't get the host back up quickly enough, you can put the disks in another host as long as it uses the same hardware RAID (i.e., LSI, Adaptec, Highpoint, etc.) and import the foreign config.

 

[jgreco]

Not only does it support live migration of the running VM (i.e., RAM) between hosts, it supports live migration of VM storage between hosts.

I once went onsite at a client's colo to do upgrades from HDD to SSD, with a RAID controller unwilling to sub SSD's for HDD's (hi Dell). The mechanics of this turns out to be very messy, so I made a hard call to shuffle VM's amongst the eight hypervisors, taking them down one at a time, rebuilding the storage on the new SSD's, reloading ESXi while I was at it, and six hours later I walked out having moved every single VM, many of them twice. Live migration of storage is really useful.

Though I've seen some VMWare hosts die unexpectedly, (hardware fault), which would have taken their VM's storage with the failed host. Can't bring up the VM on another host.

True, but that's what being able to run a VM directly from backups is all about.

 

[ArchatParks]

About four months ago, I began moving four sites to XCP-NG (all per Tom Lawrence recommendation). It has been a great move.

 

[firesyde424]

We'll be sticking with VMware. The number of tools (HA with fail over is huge for us) and flexibility it provides us with is paramount. Veeam is simply the easiest backup solution and works great with Exchange, Office 365 and on-premise servers and tightly integrates with VMware. Supposedly Veeam is looking into adding support for Proxmox.

I wish we could. The cost increase for us just isn't sustainable. It's easy to setup, administer, it has a small footprint, and the feature list is pretty big. Not to mention Veeam integration, Docker integration, the list goes on. Screw you Broadcom!

 

[dAlexis]

Looks, that now classic virtuali envs are shrinking due 2 Docker|Kubernetos etc. New server apps releases are often targeting straightly in Docker, if possible. Classic VM is taking more resources, and pod may be deployed nearly everywhere.

 

[Koop]

For most enterprise customers I know they are just going to stick with VMWare. Switching is just not worth the cost or risk. Not that I've put out some massive survey or anything.

For personal use I'd like to try out XCP-ng.

 

[Etorix]

For most enterprise customers I know they are just going to stick with VMWare. Switching is just not worth the cost or risk.

…which is just what Broadcom is betting on.
Home-labbers are no loss to them, since these were not paying customers.

 

[Samuel Tai]

My day job will likely remain on vmWare in the short term, with workload migration to cloud VMs (which are pay as-you-go) to reduce the vmWare footprint over time. This balances the risk vs reward curve associated with a big-bang migration off vmWare.

 

[TCWL]

How much they are raising the licensing fees? Seems somewhat similar of the recent Unity game engine which caused a huge backslash and many devs abandoning the product and migrating to alternatives.

Is there any specific feature which they can offer but no other virtualization platform can, or is it just cashing that delicious vendor lock-in which the stakeholders absolutely love?

 

[Koop]

…which is just what Broadcom is betting on.
Home-labbers are no loss to them, since these were not paying customers.

Yep pretty much. I am sure as @Samuel Tai pointed out it there will be a slow and steady move away from VMWare or at least a lot of scrutiny on what can be moved elsewhere. Or it'll come down to shrinking budgets. Lot of factors when it comes to enterprise. But to go to a cloud platform? I don't know, trading one problem for another there I think. May want to consider Google Cloud since they are apparently now offering no egress fees but I don't know their capabilities versus other providers. Also no idea what this really means for Google. Could be a strategy to make Google Cloud look more attractive to people who are not fully on cloud OR it could be Google trying to kill Google Cloud- choose your own adventure there, hah.

How much they are raising the licensing fees?

I am sure it's going to be on a "how deep are your pockets and install base Mr. Customer" case by base basis and not just a clean sweep, at least at the higher levels but I could be totally off here, again, just guessing.

For anyone not already paying at the enterprise level? The price is probably "you are not worth our time"

 

[Ericloewe]

How much they are raising the licensing fees?

This sort of thing is always very opaque. Reporting from STH mentions that one specific package/product was increased 10x, plus a higher minimum number of licenses.

Is there any specific feature which they can offer but no other virtualization platform can, or is it just cashing that delicious vendor lock-in which the stakeholders absolutely love?

Short answer is "no", but they do have a very polished set of products. And yes, it is a shameless cash grab above all else.

 

[nabsltd]

How much they are raising the licensing fees?

A lot for midsize customers, a decent amount for small customers, and probably not really that much for large customers.

Some inexact details:

• The minimum license for a ESXi host is now 16 cores. After that, cores can be added in increments of one. This hurts small customers who might only have 12 cores on a host.
• The was a package (the name of which I can't recall) that essentially allowed mid-sized customers like MSPs to pool all their licenses and then resell them in small chunks to their customers. This licensing even allowed the cores to not be in the same cluster or datacenter. This type of license now has a minimum of 3500 cores, when it previously had no minimum, and MSPs were paying for the 300-600 cores they actually need for their customers.
• Larger customers, OTOH, are already past these minimums, so they don't get hit with that big jump. What they do get is continuing costs for licenses per year where before the license was a one-time fee and only support was continuing. There aren't any hard numbers as to the yearly cost of a new license vs. the previous one-time cost, but any number is more than the zero that customers paid before, because if they paid for support, they got free upgrades to new permanent licenses. Only new hosts required new license purchases.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Also there were (in our experience) quite attractive bundles for SMBs named "VMware Essentials". About one grand for three years support and updates and

• three hosts with
• 2 CPUs each - no limit on cores or anything
• central management (vCenter)

No HA, no vMotion, though you could move live VMs from one host to another one through vCenter.

Oddly enough there was no renewal option for these contracts so we simply bought one every three years. We used local storage for the VMs and I build an NFS datastore on FreeBSD, ZFS and NFS - later replaced by TrueNAS - and ran ghettoVCB to perform backups of all VMs.

Should one host fail you could fire up the VMs on the remaining two straight from the NFS store, be back in service, and care about repair and performance optimisation later in a maintenance window.

I have no problem paying for products or service - but you see the difference

We replaced that cluster with TrueNAS CORE.

 

[djb]

Also there were (in our experience) quite attractive bundles for SMBs named "VMware Essentials". About one grand for three years support and updates and

• three hosts with
• 2 CPUs each - no limit on cores or anything
• central management (vCenter)

No HA, no vMotion, though you could move live VMs from one host to another one through vCenter.

Oddly enough there was no renewal option for these contracts so we simply bought one every three years. We used local storage for the VMs and I build an NFS datastore on FreeBSD, ZFS and NFS - later replaced by TrueNAS - and ran ghettoVCB to perform backups of all VMs.

Should one host fail you could fire up the VMs on the remaining two straight from the NFS store, be back in service, and care about repair and performance optimisation later in a maintenance window.

I have no problem paying for products or service - but you see the difference

We replaced that cluster with TrueNAS CORE.

@Patrick M. Hausen Hello Patrick, In Truenas Core Systems we have in menu Virtual Machines. Is this based on Bhyve type 2 hypervisor ?
Do you run debian VM's , or is it prefferable to run freeBSD VM's ?
Can you provide any guides for starting up with this ?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Hello Patrick, In Truenas Core Systems we have in menu Virtual Machines. Is this based on Bhyve type 2 hypervisor ?

Yes.

Do you run debian VM's , or is it prefferable to run freeBSD VM's ?

Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, ...

Can you provide any guides for starting up with this ?

I suggest you start here: https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/13.0/uireference/jailspluginsvms/virtualmachines/virtualmachines/

 

[LcNessie]

I'm either considering to ditch VMware for ProxMox, or perhaps even use the virtualisation capabilities of TrueNAS. For my limited use, that would actually suffice.