I just don’t see us switching our 17 datacenters to proxmox. Azure HCI, perhaps, but most likely we’ll stick with vmware, at least in the foreseeable future.
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:
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.
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?
Yeeahh... I'm thinking (hoping) he means an alternative LDAP/IDP, like Keycloak or Authentik..? Wanting to reduce reliance on Windows = kicking AD to the curb, too.
The problem with Samba AD in a container or Samba in container is that Samba isn’t designed to be run in a temporary environment. You could run it in a LXC container but anything beyond that will break things in the short or long term.
I figured you could get around some of the storage limitations with something like persistent volume claims. I’m testing it out at the moment. I am a big fan of LXC.
I see a few people have created docker Samba Containers and I’m giving them a whirl. Can’t say much for stability but I think it’s an interesting experiment.
I know in the past smb server didn’t work in LXC containers because certain kernel modules caused conflicts.
If you manage to create persistent containers how are you going to update them down the road? Like I have said previously, Samba isn’t designed in a way that allows for effectively hot swapping system components.
It seems like it would better to create a VM template and then setup a fail over cluster. Just make sure you have a time server somewhere on the network.
If you are dead set on containers you could try LDAP in a container. I just don’t think active directory was built for Linux containerization.
There are a few applications out there that I don’t fully understand the deployment of but seem to work in containers.
Typically the storage is mounted outside of the container and passed through in the compose file for docker. This allows your data to be persistent. Ideally you would also want those to reside in a file system that can easily be snapshot like ZFS. When you pull down a new docker container, it should just remount the same location and begin to run.
Or at least that’s how I’d imagine it would run. I feel like one would run into the same challenges people have running databases persistently in containers.
I’ve kept away from VMWare most of my career. I’d personally push for something KVM/QEMU based, if possible, whether it be Proxmox, LXD, or a RHEL offering. If you are in a fully MS shop, probably Hyper-V.
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.
In our case we have over 1500 employees using it, but only about 500 at a time. It’s an extreme waste of resources to have to provision 3x the hardware rather than use ephemeral systems. Also it’s much easier to patch a “gold” image and recompose entire pools than have to manage all of the systems as if they were full on laptops. Just to name a couple things off the top of my head.
Yup. That’s another reason we don’t have individual systems. And most thin clients aren’t designed to connect 1:1 to a VM. They usually need a broker of some sort.
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.
I use VirtualBox right now. My daily driver windows 10 guest is so slow, that pushing the start button comes with a 20s wait. Looking at the performance monitor while this is happening, nothing pops outs as the culprit. Plenty of resources left.
I’ve always sworn to VirtualBox, but I’m going to ask my boss for a workstation pro license next time I see him.
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.
When Broadcom acquired Symantec our pricing and customer service for SEPM went to shit. I’d be looking to switch if I was on VMWare. If it’s a small deployment, probably to native hyper-V and windows. Larger deployment, I’d be looking to change careers
We are an enterprise manufacturing company. We have lots of hosts on process networks not connected to the internet. Seems like the subscription license won’t be compatible, so we plan to seriously look at Proxmox for those in the coming years as we replace hosts.
For our datacenter, we decided to move everything to Azure. This decision was in the works before the license change, but the acquisition by Broadcom and their track record certainly played a part in the conversation.
For our site hosts, we are looking into Azure HCI or possibly Hyper-V, especially since these sites don’t have many VM’s and don’t need features offered by VMware.
If you’re an Azure expert and are looking for a new job, send me a message. We’re hiring.
I have experience with Azure IaaS, but am certainly no expert. Managed like 5 VMs max. Great with PowerShell. Wrote a script for all of our on prem servers backed up to blob storage to recover to Azure in case of natural disaster. Fun project.
I work for Disney and we're in the process of migrating all VMware boxes in our 3 data centers over to azure. We decided not to renew our contract with them. Guess it wasn't just us?
Have your group ask microsoft what the charges for Azure will be for your year 3 year 4 and year 5 commitments.
100% sure the Azure rep will gag on whatever they have in their mouths at that moment and start deflecting. If MS can fuck the US Government in a 10yr Azure contract, odds are pretty high they’ll do the same to Disney.
Source: Our company bought into O365+Azure+ADFS at a good rate for 3yrs, then got burned by MS once the honeymoon was over. They’re not going to make it fun for you all once your contract ends.
Maybe even windows remote help tool if you got a AD with microsoft accounts. (For fat clients - thinclients mostly have VNC or you could at least look at what they do by opening their RDP session)
Unfortunately the boss man decided to stick with VMware instead of migrating to proxmox. Sadly there’s no good migration solutions for proxmox unless you’re ok with a lot of down time.
Maybe if they can make a live convert tool I can convince him to make the switch. But until we can get past the hurdle of converting everything painfully we’re stuck.
I work in sales. I don’t sell anything related to VMware directly but customers bring it up. They are looking at other alternatives. Not sure what changed In the last two weeks but there has been an uptick in my customers talking about it. It’s early stage, so they haven’t decided on the path but they’ve decided they need to leave.
They canceled the ability to sell new licenses for all partners. For licenses ordered in time but not delivered before this it’s unknown whether you’ll get them. Their license activation portal went offline, so when you bought a license and got it, you couldn’t activate your software. Also they basically “fired” all of their partners and told them that they’re not eligible to offer VMWare hosting anymore unless they’re joining the new partner program and are accepted there. But it is unknown when the new partner program starts and what you hoops you have to jump through to get accepted.
So… they basically fucked most of their direct and indirect customers and didn’t provide a way forward while doing so. No wonder everyone mistrusts them now and is looking for an alternative
From what I gathered from news articles it looks like they want more control over how and where you host and will be moving everything to subscription based licenses. So it somewhat makes sense to stop handing out the current licenses and offer new ones. Problem is that it doesn’t seem to be clear which licenses you can get, which conditions apply to those, where and when you can get them,…
I think it would have been mostly fine if they had allowed for more ti.e to transition and had everything in place for the future. Then add some communication and there might have been a shitstorm, but not the mess that happened now…
will be moving everything to subscription based licenses.
That is how the industry is moving. Everything I sell is a subscription model. If it’s SAAS, it makes sense. For on premise, not always but I get why companies are pushing it.
When it was announced, not many customers were talking about it. All of a sudden, about 2-3 weeks ago, customers started moving meets because getting off VMware became a priority. Something freaked them out.
When Broadcom bought symatec it took a year for people to start freaking out. That is when they got their first new bill and I saw bills tripple.
I don’t mind it with SaaS. Also for enterprise software, you used to pay for the license and then a support package, which basically is a subscription, on top. So there’s nothing changing per se.
Problem for partners is, that they don’t know whether they’ll stay partners and whether they’ll be accepted in the new program. If not, they cannot provide their SaaS solution to their customers.
Imagine your company gets a letter from its MSP that basically reads: “Hey, VMWare doesn’t give us information about our way forward, we may be unable to continue to provide you with VMs. This happens to all partners, so no need to ask other MSPs, as those will tell you the same. We currently don’t know how to proceed, but in three months all VMs that you have hosted with us might be toast and the only people who can tell you what to do are at broadcom and don’t give out any information”
I feel like Broadcom is aiming for cloud-like pricing for on prem services with none of the other benefits inherent to an Azure or AWS deployment. Not exactly the way to hold onto clients.
I’m familiar with proxmox and the broader KVM ecosystem. I’m also a huge fan of Veeam, who have said they’re exploring support for proxmox. Shouldn’t be too difficult to implement, given they have a RHEL backup product already.
I think Broadcom intends to dig VMware out of dept to turn it into a profitable company. This means killing off the smaller customers as 90% of the business comes from enterprises that will never switch to anything else no matter the cost.
It’s really difficult to move away from a backup software you just switched to and paid > 100k to license for the next 3 years from a leadership standpoint haha. PBS, zfs snapshots and send, Ceph duplication. It all does more or less the same thing.
Proxmox is missing a lot of enterprise features. If you run a virtualized data center, it’s really not going to cut it. OTOH, if you are a small operation with just a handful of virtual servers, it might be “good enough”.
The obvious alternative was Hyper-V, but it looks like MS is already killing it to force people into Azure.
When you look at enterprise-level hypervisors, there really aren’t a lot of options.
The two big ones I see is no official vGPU support (you can get it to work unofficially but it’s not prod ready) and the clustering scheduler is still in active development while still missing several features that vSphere’s scheduler offers.
I’ll tack on just a bit from here, and maybe someone can correct me if I am wrong.
VMware’s HCI clustering is far better than proxmox + ceph/other.
VMware’s NSX network virtualization enables their fancy HCX site orchestration.
Even without NSX/HCX, Site Recovery Manager makes for a slick redundancy/fail over option.
VMware’s EUC option, Horizon, beats the absolute pants off of Citrix. And that was Citrix’s whole game.
The vGPU option first lived in EUC, but turns out scalable GPU sharing is just plain useful.
And then there is the orchestration management, allowing for power savings, automatic balancing, and more.
Basically, every high level solution they had on their platform was without a true parallel, and was built on a rock solid foundation. Even if their support is shit(it is), the platform is so ubiquitous and approachable that you could just use their support as an insurance of sorts, and it gave upgrade rights through the years.
Broadcom knows who uses those high level features, and knows they’re stuck. Our options are a full cloud migration, loss of features, or pay up. They’ll disregard every customer small enough to not need any of that, and they will milk every customer that’s too big to go anywhere else.
If you’re one of the small folks, I’d say look into proxmox, openstack, xcp-ng, or have a path to cloud in mind. If you’re one of the big folks, I recommend Balvenie, Macallan, or Johnnie Walker, cause you might as well enjoy a good drink if you’re gonna get fucked.
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