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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

This is a hot topic among some of my nerdier SME friends, and our conclusion is that the major players are HPE and Nutanix. At least from our perspective over here in Sweden.

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.

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Proxmox is about to miss their window of opportunity here. They are uniquely positioned to take on VMWare, but their outfit seems like a fairly tiny and conservative company with zero ambition to take on the world, so to speak.

If they aren't interested in that business, then it isn't really a window of opportunity for them. In fact I respect a company that chooses to not pursue business opportunities that don't fit their goals, and instead focus on being a good fit for the market they are in. Growth isn't the most important thing.

I've been at multiple companies that wasted millions courting large enterprise contacts only to not make a single sale. It does make the sales update more exciting though—if we just get this one sale…

I can't blame any company for wanting to stay out of that market.

It helps that they’re not a publicly traded company [A]. If you’re beholden to stockholders, you’re beholden to a market demanding growth at all costs. Even if the leadership at the moment wants this stable strategy, all investor pressure tends toward aggressive moves to the contrary.

[A] probably? I couldn’t conclusively determine this, and I’m not an expert

Indeed they are not. They are a Austrian GmbH, which is a special kind of company form that is not really comparable to a e.g. British or American Ltd.

Long story short, for being a publicly traded company, they would need to "transform" to an AG ("Aktiengesellschaft", where "Aktie" means "share of stock").

As I understood it, GmbH is like an LLC but with more paperwork.

A GmbH is nothing “special”, its basically the most used corporate structure in Austria (and Germany).

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)

Xcp-ng seems better positioned with a familiar vmwareish experience.

You can have a look at XCP-ng. They have the expertise and it's originally a fork of Citrix XenServer however they are completely on their own feet now delivering some interesting advancements.

They're a european business. I don't think they're interested in the stress involved in selling to enterprise.

Lifestyle business, the antithesis of Y Combinator.

https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environm...

"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 activation

>Response time: 2 hours* within a business day

What's a business day? I wouldn't call that a 24/7 SLA.

> 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.

Check out the actual FAQ entry to chase down the links embedded in those words that I'm too lazy to try to reproduce.

> You asked for an Enterprise SLA. Not all Enterprise SLAs are 24/7. IM(Professional)E, most are not 24/7.

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.

Formally, yes, they are 24/7. However, getting the expert you really need to solve the issue, that can be much harder on weekends. Sometimes it only amounts to handholding till Monday.

Microsoft seems perfectly capable of advertising 24/7 support whilst never managing to call back within 24 hours on business crippling sev1 tickets. Just look at how often someone on /r/sysadmin is shocked to find this is the norm.

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.

It’s not about the support. It’s about the blame shifting. The CTO has a piece of paper which means he’s no longer accountable. Gartner says they are good, the occasional sales lunches are expensive, and the golf game can continue.

They suck balls.

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.

Anyone who is really committed to their infrastructure will not build it on top of highly proprietary stuff where you have 0 visibility into what's actually happening so you can only hope that somebody fixes it sustainably, in a reasonable time frame and permanently.

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.

> what really is the show stopper for business.

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.

I can second technion's observations about Microsoft's "24/7" support SLA.

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...>

I should have been more clear then, definitely 24/7 SLA is what Proxmox needs to break into the enterprise sector I have experience with.

It's kind of frustrating because it's such a tiny detail that could make them a real contender in this new power vacuum.

> ...definitely [a] 24/7 SLA is what Proxmox needs to break into the enterprise sector I have experience with.

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.

Consulting the list of resellers that that page links to finds one that blatantly advertises 24x7 support, and it's likely that others will offer it if asked. See [0].

[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45637767>

That's excellent. The info a bit buried, and the lack of it front and center probably scares away a lot of clients.

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.

> The info [is] a bit buried...

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 proposed that my job move to Openshift on bare metal but there was some pushback because of missing functionnalities ?

In the end we're going with hpe.

Yes, I'd think Openshift with Kubevirt would be positioned to move in. Lots of Openshift in some of the sectors I've worked with so seems like a natural expansion.

I forgot about MSFT's ability to bundle Hyper-V though which seems to come up in this thread a lot.

Love the username.

The lack of support for SANs and ISCSI really bothers me. I like the way this style of setup works, I would like to keep doing it.

Proxmox supports both FC and ISCSI though!?

No equivalent of VMFS though.

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