A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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With free esxi over, not shocking bit sad, I am now about to move away from a virtualisation platform i’ve used for a quarter of a century.
Never having really tried the alternatives, is there anything that looks and feels like esxi out there?
I don’t have anything exceptional I host, I don’t need production quality for myself but in all seriousness what we run at home end up at work at some point so there’s that aspect too.
Thanks for your input!
OP here. Thanks for all your input! It’s really an embarrasment of riches which will take me some time to navigate. But thats part of the fun, right? Again, thanks everyone.
Coming from a decade of vmware esxi and then a few years certified Nutanix, I was almost instantly at home clustering proxmox then added ceph across my hosts and went 'wtf did I sell Nutanix for'. I was already running FreeNAS later truenas by then so I was already converted to hosting on Linux but seriously I was impressed.
Business case: With what you save on licensing for Nutanix or vsan, you can place all nvme ssd and run ceph.
Qemu/virt manager. I've been using it and it's so fast. I still need to get the clipboard sharing working but as of right now it's the best hypervisor I've ever used.
I love it. Virtmanager connecting over ssh is so smooth.
Minikube and try to get everything on Kubernetes?
I wouldn’t recommend going K8S only in a homelab. Too much effort and some things don’t fit well (Home Assistant, Gaming VM?)
It's just a suggestion. Many would probably find that the workload they host is available on containers. I run a Kubernetes cluster on bare metal at home. There's also nothing stopping you from creating VMs that you can ssh to with KubeVirt
Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea. But personally it never worked out for me.
Where does running VMs compare in any way to what Kubernetes does?
Depends on what you want to self host? Could be worth it to see if what you self host can be deployed as containers instead
Kubernetes yes, but minikube is kinda meh as a way to install it outside of development environments.
There’s so many better manageable ways like RKE/Rancher (which gives you the possibility to go k3s),Kubespray or even kubeadm.
All of those will result in a cluster that's more suitable for running actual workloads.
I'm pretty happy with XCP-ng with their XenOrchestra management interface. XenOrchestra has a free and enterprise version, but you can also compile it from source to get all the enterprise features. I'd recommend this script: https://github.com/ronivay/XenOrchestraInstallerUpdater
I'd say it's a slightly more advanced ESXi with vCenter and less confusing UI than Proxmox.
I second this and would like to add in another resource for XCP-ng : Lawrence Systems on YouTube.
I actually moved everything to docker containers at home... Not an apples to apples, but I don't need so many full OSs it turns out.
At work we have a mix of things running right now to see. I don't think we'll land on ovirt or openstack. It seems like we'll bite the cost bullet and move all the important services to amazon.
proxmox
This is the way
I'm moving to oVirt.
Proxmox was out and oVirt was an excellent fit.
Choose carefully ; don't just go with the herd.
What does oVirt offer that proxmox doesn't? I'm asking because I want to move an ESXi server to another hypervisor, I'm 90% sure it'll be Proxmox, but I'd like to know my options.
I know everyone says to use Proxmox, but it's worth considering xcp-ng as well.
In my "testing" at work and private, PVE is miles ahead of xcp-ng n terms of performance. Sure, xcp-ng does it's thing very stable, but everything else...proxmox is faster
I agree that Proxmox VE is better; I'm just saying that people should compare multiple options and pick the one they like the best.
I'm using Unraid on my home server because it can run Docker containers in addition to KVM and LXC (via a plugin).
Proxmox works well for me