Do others sense this? If so, what options do you see for folks to keep their servers but move off of VMware? Is it all RedHat?
Our Hyper-V environment came online a few months ago. It was already included with our ELA with Microsoft so we were able to splash out a bit for some higher tier support.
Granted, we have a separate team working on "genAI stuff."
We started converting virtual machines about 3 weeks ago and we've gotten through ~500 of about 3500 or so.
Our grant based HPC environment is just moving back to bare metal. The VM conversion is just for ad-hoc HPC and then all of our general infrastructure. Some of our larger application servers (SAP Hana) are possibly staying on VMWare if SAP won't support them on Hyper-V.
This summer sucked big time but we'll make it.
"If you are a Global 2000 company, VMware wants your business — from the rest, not so much,”
[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/4053783/broadcoms-vmwar...
HPE did a big brain move to support multiple hypervisor backends with their own frontend. The only way to go forward imho.
I'm using Proxmox at my current $dayjob, and we're quite happy with it. I come from a big VMware shop and I think most businesses could easily replace VMware with Proxmox.
I think Proxmox should just launch an Enterprise contract, regardless of the cost, just have one. Because right now I think the main obstacle halting adoption is their lack of any Enterprise SLA.
On a personal level I would love to see KubeVirt, or Openshift with KubeVirt, take over more. It just seems like a genius move to use the already established APIs of kubernetes with a hypervisor runtime.
"Premium"
Access to Enterprise repository
Complete feature-set
Support via Customer Portal
Unlimited support tickets
Response time: 2 hours* within a business day
Remote support (via SSH)
Offline subscription key activationWhat's a business day? I wouldn't call that a 24/7 SLA.
In the end we're going with hpe.
I forgot about MSFT's ability to bundle Hyper-V though which seems to come up in this thread a lot.
Love the username.
Migrating part of the farm and A/B testing shows good results and we’ll be able to complete it in-place before the next pizzo payment to Broadcom is due.
Thanks for the nudge, Broadcom! As far as I’m concerned, Broadcom and Oracle are tied for first on my “do not voluntarily do business with” list. Equaling Oracle in this way is a feat…
If you are on a perpetual license you can put the management vlan on a network not connected to the internet if it wasn't already and realistically this buys a few years. You will not be able to patch, eventually auditors will not accept that. For the rest not on perpetual licensing, when the licensing expires you will not be able to power on machines, if they reboot they stay off.
About half of clients we are migrating to hyper-v. Most are already running windows servers. There are some differences but hyperv covers the important features and the licensing is basically already included. Beeam makes the virtual to virtual move a lot easier, this is what most of our customers use for backups
For a good chunk they are migrating to azure or another hosted environment. If you don't have a main office with a file server or some more demanding line of business apps this is a pretty easy move.
A few are going to nutanix. Or more of expanding nutanix.
Some shops here migrate to proxmox as a UI because of certification requirements, but I migrated some of my customers to cockpit dashboard, and some to kubernetes. It's always a matter of scale and provisioning requirements.
Cockpit is my favorite so far because it's easy to setup, but its focus isn't cluster scale, which is what most larger companies need. You have to setup basically two cockpit variants: the webui and lots of cockpit server daemons (aka libvirtd on remote machines). The webui then uses SSH to login to other machines to manage them (e.g. via the known_hosts file on the webui server). [3]
Proxmox is pretty old and Perl, but it's doable. Usually storage clustering is a bit painful because you need something on a filesystem layer like ceph clusters.
There's also openshift but no idea if that is an IBM/RedHat lock-in as well, so the SMEs didn't want that risk.
[1] https://cockpit-project.org/
[2] https://www.proxmox.com/en/
[3] https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/feature-machines.ht...
Kind of sad seeing businesses getting screwed by closed source proprietary software, then making the same choices all over again.
Nutanix also seeing huge demand.
Not everyone is repeating their mistakes, with Proxmox and Xcp-ng seeing huge new level of business, as well, which is nice.
I'm part of the Apache CloudStack project and that too is seeing unparalleled levels of demand. The KVM hypervisor has sort of become the de facto choice, thanks to virt-v2v tool which can help migrate VMware guests.
If I were running the migration, my preferred pathway would’ve been to Apache Cloudstack. We had the expertise to pull it off, and it would’ve freed us from vendor partners. Nutanix was really only on the list purely from its technology portfolio; its lack of profitability and shifting towards SaaS for features like cost analysis meant that we’d be moving into a similarly bad situation as VMware at the time (wholly beholden to their business priorities instead of our own), which I didn’t care for.
There’s a lot of options out there, most of which are built atop either KVM/QEMU or OpenStack. Virtuozzo’s offerings impressed me, but the lack of a “comprehensive” product was a turnoff. Oxide was incredibly interesting from a simplicity and integration perspective, but the appetite wasn’t there to try a startup’s product. Microsoft and Oracle were both ruled out due to higher costs and more onerous licensing than VMware/Broadcom, while IBM/OpenShift were ruled out as our private cloud estate was 100% VMs with only ~20% of our internal products capable of containerization support.
The biggest advice I can give is to understand your workload today, and determine options accordingly. Everyone’s pitching K8s and containers, but if your estate is majority VMs, then a lot of those options just aren’t worthwhile.
Without that your options for HA shared storage is Ceph (which proxmox makes decently easy to run), or NFS.
1. Proxmox cannot even join a network using DHCP requiring manual IP configuration.
2. Disk encryption is a hell instead of checkbox in installer
3. Wi-Fi - no luck (rarely used for real servers, but frequently for r&d racks)
Of course, it is a Debian core underneath and a lot of things are possible given enough time and persistence, but other solutions have them out of the box.
FWIW, I use Proxmox at home. It’s a bit obtuse at times, but it runs like a champ on my N100-based NUCs.
Not kidding, that’s the main blocker. We have the DevOps knowledge on our team to go to containers, prepackaged dev environments, etc. But corporate cyber tends to respond to our requests to discuss cyber policy and escalate via proper channels with “sorry that’s against policy”.
This is not my experience at one company but multiple good, name brand companies that generally do good engineering and software work.
For example Docker Desktop being disallowed with vigor for Windows machines because it’s a virtualization tool. But Docker is fine for Linux users. And confirmed it’s not a licensing or purchasing issue.
This is lovely to strive towards and going all in on containers (albeit not with Kubernetes) has worked out great for where I work; their resistance to the approach sucks, I'm sorry you have to deal with that. Hope it works out in the end.
"Proxmox VE: Import Wizard for Migrating VMware ESXi VMs", 100 comments (2024), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39841363
NVidia are pushing hard in the direction of combined accelerators and ARM CPU (i.e. DGX, Thor, Jetson, etc).
Some of the upcoming hardware hits a sweet spot in terms of performance / $ / W. It's hard to ignore.
But Proxmox is ignoring ARM. Which is a big mistake IMO
If you're not already aware of this, then it might be worth keeping an eye on:
* DIY w/ KVM/Xen
* DIY w/ OpenStack - https://www.openstack.org/
* ProxMox - https://www.proxmox.com/en/
* Paid OpenStack through one of their partners - https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/consulting/
* OpenNebula - https://opennebula.io/
* Nutanix - https://www.nutanix.com/
If you want a solution that "just works", is simple to manage and can even extend to public cloud infrastructure when needed I can really, really recommend Nutanix. Migrating from VMWare is also really simple, they have a tool which makes that very easy. Do note that they use a heavily modified KVM as hypervisor.
We're driving anything that cannot be containerized to lift and shift to IAAS and forcing the app owners to pay for it out of their budget as motivation to modernize. They have to explain to the board why their spending increased and they are still on legacy.
- [1] - https://www.talos.dev/
Heard from a peer school on the east coast that had to sign a 600% hike in their most recent contract. Absolutely evil.
Every manager signing off the contract with vendor lock in should understand possible repercussions. Its not a rocket science. Yep they will screw you along the way with prices. Yea, that sales rep saying they won't is a lying bastard that can't care ess about your business the moment your pen raised from your signature in contract.
But people still believe in tales aren't they
But at least shareholder value is going up somewhere.
There's also Harvester "open source hyperconverged infrastructure" https://harvesterhci.io/
Or some Xen spinoff like https://xcp-ng.org/
Smaller shops are migrating to Proxmox.
For Windows shops (you sick bstrds :D) -> Hyper-V
RE: Proxmox, not a hater, but errtime I read that name, I picture "Mike Myers Dieter". Seriously tho, the best they could do for themselves would be to make ProxMox into a UI for the Incus REST API (and their legacy backend) then repackage their enterprise offerings as add-ons for Incus (for email, DRS, etc.) BTW, the first person to release an "I use this exclusively everyday for months before releasing it on Github" gesture-controlled WebGL/Audio and WebXR based UX with agentic Incus REST API sensor analysis and settings controls, will win a valuable prize.
https://aws.plainenglish.io/why-even-google-is-rethinking-ku...
-> Mind earlier warnings that many people in the Industry these days tend to follow each other around on forums creating a sort of "feedback loop" so bad trends (eg, PHP) takeover the game. <cue https://youtu.be/uPWQfAv_qBQ>
Proxmox may come to many an HN visitor's mind (and I use it myself extensively, all my home services run on it), but it actually doesn't have a lot of enterprise features and isn't a drop-in replacement.
They went to Nutanix right before the broadcom acquisition and never looked back.
They were much happier, and HCI was very nice for k8s nodes.
Of course, the clients I talk with are mostly interested in moving to the cloud or are already in the cloud, so it won't be applicable to you if you'd stay on-prem. I wanted to share my experience.
For some clients, change of technology would be more expensive than paying a bit more to VMware. You'd have to re-train half your IT department, and the migration could be long, risky and complexe. So in this case, a lift and shift move-to-cloud can be competitive, and frankly a serious option.
I see a lot of projects with Nutanix, but you'd be surprise of the price, which is almost the same as VMware. Nutanix comes with way more features than vanilla vsphere which explains the cost increase. You'd have NSX and vSAN packaged, plus replication features. Nutanix offers a great alternative. Actually, OVH proposes Nutanix too, so we can be agnostic and have a sort of leverage over Broadcom.
Some clients are ok to move to public cloud (equivalent AWS/Azure..). The smaller the infra the easier it is. It can be very cheap at OVH. Also it's great if you do containers because of the universal nature of them, they are easy to migrate. However, If the client has a lot of Windows Server, the cost is actually higher (at OVH the price of the Windows Server Licence is higher than at Azure..) because we cannot leverage the Windows Datacenter licenses
The cheapest viable option is to go to Proxmox on Baremetal servers. The features are close to a standard vSphere environnement. The lack of enterprise support is the thing that stops most clients to do this move.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1jfumvw/broadcom_...
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/22/euro_cloud_body_ecco_...
Milking customers is already a thin ice but in combination with declining quality it's a death sentence.
For servers, there’s things like Proxmox that are super versatile and can be deployed to a 1U server in a few hours. And if whatever you’re virtualizing exists mostly in the application/user layer and doesn’t touch lower level APIs (eg raw TCP), Docker/Portainer is even better (no Kubernates required!).
Hire a couple of sysadmins who know their ass from a hole in the ground.
Hardware requirements for Proxmox are way more flexible (and cheaper) than VMware, in our experience. Plus, more MSPs are jumping on the Proxmox train, so the support scene is growing fast.
Proxmox isn’t a perfect VMware clone, but it covers a lot of ground for service providers or mid-sized setups that want reliability, flexibility, and lower costs.
Doing a head-on VMware takeout path hasn’t been a good business strategy for companies that tried it.
Nutanix is just as expensive and also a locked in option.
Seems to me everyone is going to Proxmox, Xen, or hyperv. Honourable mention but technically apples to oranges. Kubernetes and docker.
Redhat openshift? I have never heard of anyone trying to go to it. I like how they try to mix vms and containers... but i dunno it seems to suffer from the standard red hat problem.
I am seeing Nutanix the most, then Proxmox, Openshift.
For some sub products, Avi is often going to HAproxy, Aria to a combination of Terraform, Datadog (and others)
You dont think enterprise IT does sensible things like have multiple vendors to avoid single points of failure.
There's even an example project to do this in code: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
Virtualbox
Parallel
Hyper-V
--- EDIT ---
I've made some research and now understand that Hyper-V runs alongside the Windows Server (i.e. it is not an in-windows app). Therefore it would be hard to achieve the ESX performance close to ESX or Hyper-V even when deploying on linux. Or wouldn't it? Maybe considering a partition as disk for virtualbox? Idle Linux overhead isn't this much, is it?
E.g. Parallel's is only useful for people looking to run VMs locally on their Mac, but Hyper-V can be anything from that for a Windows PC to a full-blown headless hypervisor cluster with HA, shared volumes, replication, etc.
For several of the common categories, these are my takes:
- Traditional Enterprise: Nutanix [paid] if money is available, otherwise Hyper-V [paid] if a large Microsoft contract is already in place. If neither fit: fall through to acting like an SMB.
- SMB/Modern Mid-Sized Enterprise: Cloud [paid] only and/or Proxmox [free/paid]
- Tech Company: Doesn't matter, they'll do whatever sounds cool that year and make it work well enough
- Home Lab: Proxmox [free/paid]
- Windows PC: Hyper-V [free w/ Windows] (it's meh, but it's integrated - doubly so if you plan on using WSL on the side).
- Mac PC: Parallels [paid] if you need a GPU accelerated Windows guest, UTM [free] otherwise.
- Linux PC: QEMU+KVM [free], the choice of (optional) GUI client is up to preference.
Some extra notes by solution:
- Nutanix: Enterprises were staring to use this more and more even prior to the VMware sale. It's definitely the spiritual successor of traditional VMware usage in the data center. A bit less full of themselves, for now at least, than VMware ever managed to keep themselves (IMO).
- Proxmox: Has a bit of a habit of feeling like it always ends up a little broken by the time you've used an install/cluster for 6 months, but is by far the best option for the homelabber type use case (even ignoring that it's free as a reason). It's basically like someone configured KVM with what you want to be able to just (try to) use it without thinking about what's underneath, while still having access to the underneath to un-stick it in certain situations. Also does host-native containers! I never did have the guts to pitch my company try to run anything production on a cluster, but they do have reasonably priced support plans and advanced feature tiers for that.
- Parallels: Kind of sucks for the price, but there isn't anything else on macOS with the same GPU acceleration for Windows.
- Hyper-V: I think this is mostly still around because it helps Microsoft stay sticky at companies when the yearly renewal comes up. That said, it's alright - and it's also integrated into Windows in some pretty nifty ways for local use these days.
- UTM: Fantastic QEMU client for macOS, worth giving a few bucks for even though it's free.
In theory, it's great. In practice, if you need to get "support" from someone else, it's not so great anymore, as all these companies have been discovering.
I would use VM technology if whoever wrote it would provide me with a contract saying that if anyone were to find just one program that would crash their VM (while not crashing a real machine) or miscompute, that I would get a billion dollars.
To answer your question: I was smart enough to never use it in the first place.
In this light, Broadcom, a hardware vendor, who buys a popular virtualization product does a "smart" move - it supposedly eliminates the very thing that eats away their profits. But it only looks smart to the vendor itself. For everyone else, the move looks unprofessional and incompetent.
But, even if you restrict it to 'x86 virtualization', the alternative for the current crop of 'enterprise' OS environments is ...server sprawl. I'm a big fan of discrete hw for some things, but it can be a hard sell for everything.