Comment by uriahlight
15 hours ago
The sad part is that most companies using VMWare could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares.
15 hours ago
The sad part is that most companies using VMWare could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares.
> […] could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares.
As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago.
Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenStack is useful for many large scale environments (especially with tenant isolation and usage tracking/billing/chargebacks).
Proxmox is good a good solution for SMBs, but (especially pre-9.x) there were a bunch of things that made it much less usable for large(r) scale deployments IMHO.
I started migrating my customers from VMware a good three years ago.
It does help that I have thirty years Linux experience compared to the paltry twenty five or so of VMware (which was RedHat plus stuff back in day)
I also have rather a lot of Hyper V exposure too and I defy you to love its iSCSI and networking, let alone that awful vTPM thingie.
It's Proxmox for me, any day. Even when I've completely knackered it I can always boot a systemrescuecd and mount and chroot the thing back to life.
I too ran a large VDI, server, and scientific computing cluster based on Linux - libvirt in my case. I saved a bunch of money over VMware. When I quit to go to a higher paying job, they had to rip and replace everything with vSphere because they couldn't find anyone willing to work for .edu money with the skills to manage that despite the massive cost savings.
I had asked for vSphere to avoid this problem, and they balked at the licensing costs even in the good ol' days.
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I was working on a pretty big proxmox setup back in 2016...
> I was working on a pretty big proxmox setup back in 2016...
Define "pretty big". Proxmox officially supports up to 32 nodes in a cluster and the Proxmox folks themselves have "seen clusters of around ~24 nodes in production" (as of 2025) and for "bigger clusters than that, fine-tuning might be necessary":
* https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-with-48-nodes.1746...
There are folks talking about running things in the high-40s and low-50s, but that's not officially support. If you have beefy hardware you can fit a lot of VMs on a single hypervisor (I've always found running out of RAM is often the limit).
A single vSphere cluster can have up to 96 nodes (without vSAN), and vCentre can handle multiple clusters (2500 total hosts; 40k VMs). Proxmox recently released Cluster Manager, which helps with feature parity.
I'm a happy user of Proxmox for a number of years (and helped ran OpenStack before that), but I think for large(r) scale deployments (and even smaller ones) there's a good reason which VMware was so popular. (How many folks are actually at that (large(r)) scale is a different question.)
(Also: XCP-ng doesn't seem to get much press. Haven't used it myself though.)
Well good news, it's improved quite a bit. File level restore is a thing now..
I have professional experience with all listed (both on vendor and user side), other than hyper-v. Nutanix is probably the closest true solution to VMware, although not 1:1. VMware is an excellent piece of tech run by people who DGAF and just want the $.
I like Proxmox a lot, but it is technically and commercially several years behind. There is no moat, and when stuff slides sideways, you need to understand what's going on (e.g a competent sysadmin). That is changing with the recent Proxmox NA announcement, but still not there.
OpenStack is not the same product at all, and is about an order of magnitude more complicated. Much more powerful, but instead of a good sysadmin, you probably want a team (and maybe some core devs).
I emphasize most, not all. Most companies using VMWare even 5 years ago could have achieved similar infrastructure using Proxmox. It's been a viable alternative for years. It's always intrigued me how easily big companies get pulled into licensing nightmares because their execs get bullshitted into believing a sales pitch at a seminar. Anyone who has worked with Oracle's product lineup instinctively knows what I'm talking about.
Also the support contacts, which require you to send system logs to VMWare of you want them to fix something. For a lot of companies this is a no go.
Waste of money
Anyone larger like that automatically also can afford the staff to simply address any shortcomings in-house and then own it forever, and perfectly tailored, and perfectly customizable at any time forever. There is no missing feature that a few hours or days of developer time doesn't erase.
Oh it's crude on day one? So what? You're still operating and on your own terms, and every week a few more minutes of work gets added as little pain points get addressed by whoever cares, and before you know it it's better than anything you can buy, and the total cost was less than your previous licensing, and you never had to deal with a serial number or license manager or account rep, never had to care one bit about counting cpu cores or client seats or vms or physical hosts or ips or backup copies or spinning up new dev boxes or more production without warning or any of that bs.
The bigger you are, the less you need the convenience of outsourcing, not more.
> The bigger you are, the less you need the convenience of outsourcing, not more.
Quite often the bigger you are the more the higher ups want risk to be mitigated, and so are often glad to cut a cheque to be able to yell at someone over the phone.
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It's been years i played with Proxmox. Back then it wasn't as easy as Vmware Esxi was/still is: Just boot a pretty small os, define a datastore somewhere, just grow disks, migrate them, etc. All done with some clicks of a mouse button in a nice web gui. Maybe i should start playing with Proxmox again?
Proxmox is good for a home lab but running an enterprise on it is a joke. Good luck with that
You work for Broadcom don't you fella?