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?
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.
"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-vmwar...
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.
I can't blame any company for wanting to stay out of that market.
[A] probably? I couldn’t conclusively determine this, and I’m not an expert
Long story short, for being a publicly traded company, they would need to "transform" to an AG ("Aktiengesellschaft", where "Aktie" means "share of stock").
Its a limited liability structure and most businesses from small to large that have private shareholders use it (Red Bull or Porsche Holding are GmbHs for example)
"Premium"
Access to Enterprise repository
Complete feature-set
Support via Customer Portal
Unlimited support tickets
Response time: 2 hours* within a business day
Remote support (via SSH)
Offline subscription key activationWhat's a business day? I wouldn't call that a 24/7 SLA.
You asked for an Enterprise SLA. Not all Enterprise SLAs are 24/7. IM(Professional)E, most are not 24/7.
> What's a business day?
From the FAQ on the page linked to by guerby:
What are the business days/hours for support?
Ticket support provided by the Proxmox Enterprise support team is available on Austrian business days (CET/CEST timezone) for all Basic, Standard, or Premium subscribers, please see all details in the Subscription Agreement.
For different timezones, contact one of our qualified Proxmox resellers who will be able to offer you help with Proxmox solutions in your timezone and your local language.
Any serious enterprise software or hardware company absolutely has a 24/7 support option. They all have a base option that is not 24/7 for a significantly lower price.
There’s no way you’re replacing VMware in any company of any size without 24/7 support.
I know thst youre right about the wording turning off orgs but I do wonder when the biggest enterprise organisation can barely offer it in practice what really is the show stopper for business.
The trap is you need Microsoft support training & strategy. If you buy unified and open a sev a, they just fuck around and assign an engineer from Antartica who works from 3AM-6:20AM Mongolian time, then reassign at 6:19AM to dude in Japan to reset their 2 hour SLA for the incident manager. In general, if you are big, you're better off buying Premier from a partner, and declaring a crit sit. Many issues are fixable by less dumb third party L2 techs, and you can leverage the partner's juice with Microsoft to get somebody. You have the ability to inflict real pain on the reseller, but all Microsoft will do for a strategic customer is send some VP of something to apologize profusely at great length and suggest the more staff meet with your TAM/CSM so they can get a dramatic reading of a powerpoint. Companies like this only understand pain, so you need leverage.
Microsoft is uniquely bad at this type of stuff. Anyone committing serious infrastructure where bad things are gonna happen when it goes down is insane for using HyperV. But you're also insane expecting a small reseller of some small company to pull your chestnuts out of the fire.
With open source, if you have the right people, you can find/ bisect down to the commit and function where the problem is exactly, which speeds up the remedy immensely. We have done such a thing with backup restores from the Proxmox Backup Server. The patches are now in Proxmox VE 9.0 because the low hanging fruit problem was actually with the client code not the Proxmox Backup Server.
The show stopper is explaining to your CEO that you don’t have 24/7 support on a piece of software that’s core to the business.
You can explain away horrible 24/7 support and keep your job. Not so much if you buy something that doesn’t even offer it and you have a hard outage at 5pm on a Friday.
Anyway, as the FAQ answer that I quoted mentions, there are plenty of qualified Proxmox resellers who offer support for folks who are dissatisfied with what is offered by Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH. One reseller explicitly advertises 24x7 support [0]. I expect others would offer 24x7 support if you asked, but don't see the need to advertise it up-front.
[0] <https://www.proxmox.com/en/partners/find-partner/all/partner...>
It's kind of frustrating because it's such a tiny detail that could make them a real contender in this new power vacuum.
Well, their FAQ says:
For different timezones, contact one of our qualified Proxmox resellers who will be able to offer you help with Proxmox solutions in your timezone and your local language.
Proxmox needs to better their reputation right now if they're going to be counted as a contender, and burying the fact that you can have 24/7 SLA is not a good way of improving that reputation of being mostly for the homebrew crowd.
No. It took me less than 60 seconds to find it.
> ...the lack of it front and center probably scares away a lot of clients.
I've done on-call enterprise support for the products that I and the folks I worked with maintained and extended. We were whatever tier "the folks who work on the product" is. [0]
I can pretty authoritatively tell you that the folks who are scared away by a 60->120 second search to answer the question "It looks like this one vendor doesn't offer 24/7 support, but they do offer a list of certified support vendors. Do one or more of the vendors they certify to provide support and training provide 24/7 support?" are the sort of folks you rather don't want as customers.
[0] Tier 2? Tier 3? Who knows?
I forgot about MSFT's ability to bundle Hyper-V though which seems to come up in this thread a lot.
Love the username.
In the end we're going with hpe.
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…
slow clap
Broadcom definitely seems to be in a reaping stage.
I expect things like VMWare to disappear in a few years because some competitors taking those other customers will slowly make things better until those still buying VMWare go elsewhere anywhere because it is good enough. There is only so long they can sell bundles of everything before customers decide the total price is too high - so it might not even be VMWare's competitors are good enough so much as everywhere else is good enough and VMWare needs to be tossed too.
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.
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/
[2] https://www.proxmox.com/en/
[3] https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/feature-machines.ht...
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.
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.
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.
Without that your options for HA shared storage is Ceph (which proxmox makes decently easy to run), or NFS.
FWIW, I use Proxmox at home. It’s a bit obtuse at times, but it runs like a champ on my N100-based NUCs.
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.
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.
This is lovely to strive towards and going all in on containers (albeit not with Kubernetes) has worked out great for where I work; their resistance to the approach sucks, I'm sorry you have to deal with that. Hope it works out in the end.
"Proxmox VE: Import Wizard for Migrating VMware ESXi VMs", 100 comments (2024), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39841363
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
If you're not already aware of this, then it might be worth keeping an eye on:
* DIY w/ KVM/Xen
* DIY w/ OpenStack - https://www.openstack.org/
* ProxMox - https://www.proxmox.com/en/
* Paid OpenStack through one of their partners - https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/consulting/
* OpenNebula - https://opennebula.io/
* Nutanix - 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.
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/
Heard from a peer school on the east coast that had to sign a 600% hike in their most recent contract. Absolutely evil.
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
But at least shareholder value is going up somewhere.
There's also Harvester "open source hyperconverged infrastructure" https://harvesterhci.io/
Or some Xen spinoff like https://xcp-ng.org/
Smaller shops are migrating to Proxmox.
getting out of vmware is a different story.
Not really, wasn't difficult
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-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>
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.
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.
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.
"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the results" - Charlie Munger
Their game is clearly to squeeze very hard for a few years, and then deprecate the product. I can't imagine that there are companies that are fine with such price hikes.
VMWare has always been proprietary, there's been some handwringing a few times about the fact that they borrow from FOSS quite a bit.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-developer-abandons-vmwar...
Milking customers is already a thin ice but in combination with declining quality it's a death sentence.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1jfumvw/broadcom_...
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/22/euro_cloud_body_ecco_...
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!).
Hire a couple of sysadmins who know their ass from a hole in the ground.
Doing a head-on VMware takeout path hasn’t been a good business strategy for companies that tried it.
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.
Nutanix is just as expensive and also a locked in option.
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.
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)
You dont think enterprise IT does sensible things like have multiple vendors to avoid single points of failure.
There's even an example project to do this in code: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
Virtualbox
Parallel
Hyper-V
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.
--- EDIT ---
I've made some research and now understand that Hyper-V runs alongside the Windows Server (i.e. it is not an in-windows app). Therefore it would be hard to achieve the ESX performance close to ESX or Hyper-V even when deploying on linux. Or wouldn't it? Maybe considering a partition as disk for virtualbox? Idle Linux overhead isn't this much, is it?
In the case of ESXi it's about the clustering, filesystem/network virtualization, management and orchestration for hundreds of servers, disaster recovery, enterprise security/software integrations, and so on. That VirtualBox requires a client OS is just a footnote in the comparison of functionality.
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.
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.
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.