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Leaving VMware? Consider these 5 FOSS hypervisors • The Register (www.theregister.com)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Can anyone weigh in on whether any of these can be used for a cluster?

I use VMware in my homelab via vMUG, and I'm sure that's going to get destroyed next, so I'm looking for an alternative that can allow for running VMs across hosts using shared storage with migrations between hosts. I'd prefer FOSS, but the only hypervisor I know supports all of this right now is hyper-V. I really REALLY don't want to use hyper-v.... Most of my workloads are Linux, with a handful of Windows servers that I use for an internal domain and testing.

Maybe OpenStack or OpenNebula?

Any suggestions?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Why wouldn't you use Proxmox?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I have not observed anyone using it in a cluster.

From the brief Google searching I've done it appears to be possible, though, I'm not sure if proxmox skills will help me professionally. I used VMware before because I needed to learn VMware esxi and vcenter. I know it fairly well at this point.

I want to target a hypervisor solution used in large companies, I'm not sure that's proxmox. Currently I'm leaning towards OpenStack, since I know some cloud providers use it for VPS offerings. I know enough about hyper-V that I know I don't want to use it, ever. At least outside the context of Azure VMs. I can't really do Azure cloud at home (they're is a way, I've looked into it, but it's very expensive), though my current workplace uses Azure extensively.

I'm just not aware of any company using proxmox as a VM platform, whether single host or clustered.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Well I can't speak for enterprise but for me it works pretty well in a 3 node cluster. I can live transfer VMs that are hosting services with very little interruption. Proxmox also supports HA and Ceph but I haven't used those features.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Good to know. I'll examine everything carefully. I've been debating on replacing my existing monolithic iSCSI storage configuration with Ceph, so maybe that will weigh in.... Having something that can access Ceph natively is a big plus. Otherwise I need something to sit in between that can basically translate Ceph to iSCSI luns, which is just more complexity that I'd like to avoid.

A lot of things to consider. Thank you for the comments.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The weird thing to me about the majority of VMware environments I see is that they exist to prop up and extend Microsoft environments.

Microsoft is hostile towards this use case because having your own cloud competes with their cloud products.

VMware was a commodity product that exists because they know how desperately IT professionals need to keep these Windows systems running with some level of reliability with advanced backup and replication strategies. And it was good.

After trying out proxmox I can say that:

  1. VM performance under windows is much faster on vmware. I think this boils down to the drivers for storage. I could go more into detail but not here.
  2. Containers and Linux VMs are offering me more than I ever really hoped for in proxmox.

But now I'm starting to think what the alternatives are really. VMware was a windows first virtualization platform. Other virtualization platforms in the open source ecosystem really put things like Linux first. Having to race to get to the point of hosting windows systems with constantly increasing licensing prices has really diminished the value to me of virtualization over all for windows.

I think we as a community need to move away from windows on the server and embrace technologies like containers,docker,podman, Kubernetes and phase out reliance on Windows.

For starters, does anybody have a rock solid setup guide for a Kubernetes Active Directory System?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Active directory doesn't normally go with Kubernetes. What are you asking?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Now what about EUC replacements. That’s the more sticky situation.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

For those who don't know, EUC stands for end user computing.

Why is so hard to setup VMs for employees? Maybe I'm missing something but it seems like a matter of just creating a virtual machine with a GPU attached.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

Very significantly different performance requirements. The client communication needs tuning for fast UI response. Unified comms (zoom, teams, etc) need to be redirected to avoid bottlenecking through the server. usage patterns aren't very well distributed (everyone logs in at 8) which means you can't over subscribe as much.

It's very different than a server workload.

Source: I run 80k of these.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

The list for those that don’t want to read the whole article:

  1. Proxmox
  2. XCP-ng
  3. OpenNebula
  4. SUSE Harvester
  5. Oracle VM VirtualBox
[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I can relly recommend proxmox. Some years ago we switched from a 60.000€ dell VMWare Storage/Server-Setup to a three Host proxmox Setup for about half the price (to be fair, add 5-10k for Setup for our local Linux Team because we did not know much about proxmox). Mainly because we were able to place one of the Hosts in our Warehouse (connected with 10g Fiber) so there theoretically will be no harm to our production in case of water/fire/whatever in the server room because the one system can instantly take over (after some learning it works Like a Charm). I had some concerns regarding ceph, but for us it has proven Rocksolid, even while we had some real weird Switch issues it always recovered fast and without issues as soon as the connection was there. A big issue were the licensing terms for Microsoft products because with three amd-systems you have a lot of cores to buy licenses for - so we had a good excuse to substitute and cut out some products that only supported Windows environments.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I like Virtualbox, use it myself in several instances but I would never consider it a replacement for VMware.