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.