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Comment by grepfru_it | Hacker News Reader

>everyone should be looking into alternatives

I'm interested to hear this community's take on what an alternative to vmware is. And I'm not talking about just ESX, I'm talking about their entire ecosystem including vsphere and all of it's features that an enterprise environment depends on.

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No two environments are the same. Instead of looking for a like for like total replacement (even though you actually don't use all VMware features or use some only because they were the only way possible in VMware's ecosystem and not because they're actually any good (vRA, Log Insight)), evaluate your actual needs and what do you need to run under what conditions. You'll probably end up discovering that any of Proxmox, OpenStack Nutanux, oVirt, Ganetti, Kubernetes (with or without KubeVirt), Nomad (with or without VMs) will cover most if not all that you need.

You will also probably end up discovering your costs drastically inflate. There is a reason why companies stick with bundled products. Find a way to bundle that mismash of software you mentioned into a single pane of glass with a 4 year support guarantee and you will be rich.

You will quickly find out why it hasn’t been done and why Redhat and Microsoft look so promising after all

Ha, nonsense. VMware products are notoriously super expensive. From discussions with people at organisation switching to alternatives, their cost are going down 30-50%, with all the added benefits of a proper modern orchestrator instead of an obsolete hardware simulator. (Stuff like having a way of securely introducing secrets or security authenticating workloads, or integrated deployments, healthchecks, etc.)

Also, "bundled" stuff constraints you. You're forced into using VMware's crap orchestrator or log management tool because it's the one that works best with the mess that is other VMware products.

OpenStack

So 10 years ago I was part of a project which pitted VMware vsphere against openstack. VMware was cheaper opex by a factor of 4 and they were using ESXi as the hypervisor. Openstack is a non starter for enterprise environments.

Now with containers and kubernetes being the standard, openstack is another very very heavy distribution your organization must maintain

OpenStack's got Magnum for that need.

The framework for deployment has vastly improved.

> VMware was cheaper opex by a factor of 4 and they were using ESXi as the hypervisor

How could it be 4x cheaper in Opex when OpenStack is an open source project with multiple competing vendors available if you want support? In terms of non-licensing costs, OpenStack has a few more services that need to be deployed separately, but I don't see that costing 4x, especially when those services often don't have VMware equivalents.

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