IanMajor12, could you tell me where I find Tom’s videos that you comment? Thank you.
In my work we have virual machines in vmware, we export them through esxi, we import them with Xcp-ng Center but at the time of doing the import they mark us error, they could help me in telling me how is the correct way to import vm’s vmware to xcp-ng?
IanMajor12 could you tell me how was the migration process from vmware to xcp-ng?
Tom, could you help me? Thank’s
I’ve decided to share my experience with you guys.
On my side, I’ve used GDSX/ESX/ESXi in production since the early 2000s and of course, when the company has deep pockets, it is probably the best thing when you can use all the tools. But when you arrive at home, of for some small-to-medium companies, it is way overprived for what it is - and worse if you virtualize Windows machine (double licensing cha-ching !!).
So I turned (in the 2012 era) to Hyper-V on 2012R2 because of the great licensing Microsoft was offereing for their Datacenter Edition: unlimited Windows (any) VM on Hyper-V + Datacenter 2012R2. That was very good - too good in fact - until MS changed their licensing for Server 2016 and after.
Then, as a coincidence only, I had to perform some benchmarks between Hyper-V 2012/2016/2019 vs ESXI 6.x only to find (and realized a bit late) that Hyper-V was really slow for it’s network performance (mostly) and had more impact on multitasking. Internal private switches on the hyper-v hypervisor itself was toping at 9Gbps whereas in ESXi, I was able to reach 45+ Gbps on the same modern (2018) Intel hardware.
That peaked my curiosity and I wondered if other hypervisors would lend some different results. So my quest to tame XCP-nb and Proxmox started.
I really like XCP-ng at first but I found the Windows client a bit lackluster. Then move to use XO (the free edition) but frankly, I hate that interface of that style in general (they are not very ergnomic) as you have to do many ‘clicks’ to actually perform basic actions. As for the performance, well, it was ok, but since XCP-ng is based of CentOS, newer hardware like the Ryzen processors aren’t well supported and I found some limited bandwidth in my network benchmarks. For instance, I was able to get better virtual switch performance on a Xeon X5670 (10 year old cpu) than on a Ryzen 1800X which doesn’t really make any sense as the 8-core AMD chip outperform 2 x X5670 (12 cores) in any heavy multitasking tasks.
Then lately, I am dabbling with Proxmox and WOW! Just WOW! That is the perfect virtualization platform. You get absolutely everything out of the box with no extra licensing - and the performance is there too on recent hardware over that! It is based of Ubuntu server LTS and it shows. It is sleek, fast, and perform very well in everything up to now. This is the kind of platform I would recommended to even large enterprises. And if you want Pro support, you can buy it for reasonable prices - which is what I am planning right now for my own setup at home in order to encourage those engineers at Proxmox.
TL;DR : My ranking of hypervisors base on performance and price would be this:
#1 - Proxmox (KVE/QEMU) - Open source - Ubuntu server based - works great on old & new hardwares + clustering is a charm + Pro support available.
#2 - XCP-ng - Open source - CentOS based - lacklust Windows client - unproductive Xen Orchestra web interface + requires a special VM in order to let you access all the feature
#3 - ESXi - Closed sourced - Orginally based on Linux kernel - Does everything if you have deep pockets. A bit uselessly complex after each iteration of their product.
#4 - Hyper-V - If you’re in a Windows shop and you have the money, are using SCCM already, well that might be ok for you if performance is not an issue.
Not tested:
-RedHat Virtualization (RHV) - then again, regression testing on newer hardward haven’t been done. So if you are getting AMD’s new EPYC processors, that might still not be a good idea and I would not use that platform.