Apologies if this is not the right forum for this question but I am curious as to what alternatives folks with day jobs in IT are exploring now that Broadcom has resorted to extortion pricing for VMware? My company has a farm of about 300 ESX servers and 3000+ VMs connected to a FC SAN with Pure and Netapp arrays. I’m not sure what we’re actually looking at for VMware alternatives but I probably need to start researching since I’m a storage guy. At home I play with Proxmox and Truenas but I really have no idea how scalable they are in a corporate environment. For those whose employers are thinking of jumping ship and leaving VMware, what are you looking at to replace it? Thanks!
I’d take a look at XCP-NG, Lawrence Systems has solid content on it. I run it in my homelab and am working toward deploying it in production. It scales better than most people expect, but you’ll want to test storage integration, HA/live migration, and support options. Really requires testing and what is required from the org.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lawerence+systems+XCP-NG+VMware
2 Likes
I can’t speak for the scalability of Proxmox but we have done many larger deployments of XCP-ng. They do offer corporate support and SLA options.
2 Likes
We’ve got 26 hosts under our xen instance. Migrated our production cluster over from VMware last year.
While I have been using xen + xcp-ng for years it’s a new system for my co-workers, but they’ve started to like it far more than VMware.
1 Like
You really need to look at all of the different VMware products and options that are deployed. XCP-ng is easy to work with and might be a good choice if it fits your use case. Once you tally up all the VMware products, it might be worth contacting Vates to discuss if it is possible.
Assuming you are also a Microsoft account holder, what size license do you have and how many of those duties could be handled with hyper-v at no additional cost?
Do you have a big container workflow with Tanzu? That might point you towards Harvester HCI and Rancher.
At the price where I work, $120 per core, 300 servers at minimum of 16 cores is going to be a lot of money. VCF 9 will make the licensing a little more flexible as it seems to remove minimums from the payment scheme, but still core based. You are licensing total core count, split across hardware as you see fit.
I would guess that the majority of places looking to migrate were using VMware Enterprise + without really any of the additional options. If this is the case, then moving to XCP-ng and or Hyper-V should be a “simple” migration.
In theory, Windows will handle container workflows too, but I’ve never tried even simple Docker containers with it yet. But Tanzu was a different beast being Kubernetes management. Again theory is that Kubernetes can run on XCP-ng, but never tried it. I think I’d learn Harvester or Rancher based before I tried to run Kubernetes on XCP-ng, Rancher (and Harvester on top of it) was built to handle these workflows, not applied on top later. Running Rancher/Harvester along side XCP-ng certainly seems workable, but also kind of a duplication since you can run VMs on Harvester. The hyper converged part might be an issue, I haven’t looked into Harvester enough to know if it supports iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and FC storage. I would like to think it does, but I think Nutanix is still building this out from their HCI only ways of the past.
Nutanix and Hyper-V seem like the popular options for converged infrastructure. You could also look at RedHat OpenShift, Openstack, or Scale Computing HC3.
Thanks for the comments and experiences. For background I’m a SAN/Storage admin and all of our ESX hosts are currently FC connected to Brocade and Cisco SAN switches. I would guess that over 90-95% of the guests are Windows. Lets just say that our Windows team is vehemently opposed to iSCSI for whatever their reasons are (that pre-date me) so any non VMware solution would be FC. Has anyone done a migration from VMware to one of the aforementioned hypervisors in an FC SAN environment? I know VMware on FC SAN is solid but we don’t have any other hypervisors connecting to the SAN today. Thanks again for your time.
My migrations involving NetApp or Pure were usually moving to NFS or iSCSI. I still maintained separate switches for the storage traffic. When I worked with EMC or 3PAR it was on FC.
I’ve migrated between ESXi and Hyper-V numerous times and deployed VMware, RedHat, and Hyperflex in greenfields.
I used the Cisco/NetApp Flexpod validated design guides for much of the architecture.
BTW, fun name 
Redhat Openshift? Have we forgotten what they did to CentOS? Unless I were running on Redhat, I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole. I still stay away from Oracle due to the Open Solaris thing over a decade ago.
Hyper-V only because a lot of corporations already pay for unused licenses. Most A/E 3 or A/E 5 contracts will have extra for a cluster.
If I refused to touch a companies products because they did something I didn’t agree with in the past, I’d likely only be using brand new ones until they do the same.