Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

This is a hot topic among some of my nerdier SME friends, and our conclusion is that the major players are HPE and Nutanix. At least from our perspective over here in Sweden.

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.

sgt · 5 months ago

Proxmox is about to miss their window of opportunity here. They are uniquely positioned to take on VMWare, but their outfit seems like a fairly tiny and conservative company with zero ambition to take on the world, so to speak.

bigstrat2003 · 5 months ago

If they aren't interested in that business, then it isn't really a window of opportunity for them. In fact I respect a company that chooses to not pursue business opportunities that don't fit their goals, and instead focus on being a good fit for the market they are in. Growth isn't the most important thing.

kaliszad · 5 months ago

You can have a look at XCP-ng. They have the expertise and it's originally a fork of Citrix XenServer however they are completely on their own feet now delivering some interesting advancements.

conception · 5 months ago

Xcp-ng seems better positioned with a familiar vmwareish experience.

veeti · 5 months ago

Lifestyle business, the antithesis of Y Combinator.

matt-p · 5 months ago

They're a european business. I don't think they're interested in the stress involved in selling to enterprise.

guerby · 5 months ago

https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environm...

"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 activation

INTPenis · 5 months ago

>Response time: 2 hours* within a business day

What's a business day? I wouldn't call that a 24/7 SLA.

grimblee · 5 months ago

I proposed that my job move to Openshift on bare metal but there was some pushback because of missing functionnalities ?

In the end we're going with hpe.

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jwithington · 5 months ago

Yes, I'd think Openshift with Kubevirt would be positioned to move in. Lots of Openshift in some of the sectors I've worked with so seems like a natural expansion.

I forgot about MSFT's ability to bundle Hyper-V though which seems to come up in this thread a lot.

Love the username.

eppp · 5 months ago

The lack of support for SANs and ISCSI really bothers me. I like the way this style of setup works, I would like to keep doing it.

throwaway270925 · 5 months ago

Proxmox supports both FC and ISCSI though!?

At PriorCo, I did a slide deck presentation of our options at the time (2023/2024) and pitched essentially three pathways: stay on VMware, move to Apache Cloudstack, or move to Nutanix. The deck was roundly ignored in favor of a lift-and-shift to AWS for remaining infrastructure.

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.

ecxzw · 5 months ago

Would you be considering Oxide in the future with their recent $100M Series B funding round, their recent sales to clients like Lawerence Livermore National Labs, and the recent AWS outage in mind?

MaKey · 5 months ago

What's the reason for not considering Proxmox?

SteveNuts · 5 months ago

They seriously need to invest in a well engineered multi node cluster filesystem. VMFS made VMware into the behemoth it is.

Without that your options for HA shared storage is Ceph (which proxmox makes decently easy to run), or NFS.

garganzol · 5 months ago

My 2 cents: Proxmox is too rigid. For example:

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.

stego-tech · 5 months ago

Proxmox wasn’t considered because of the audience (leadership) and Proxmox’s perceived market (SMBs/homelabs). I couldn’t even get them to take Virtuozzo seriously, so Proxmox was entirely a non-starter, unfortunately.

FWIW, I use Proxmox at home. It’s a bit obtuse at times, but it runs like a champ on my N100-based NUCs.

natebc · 5 months ago

Our 5 year ELA for VMware went from 1.5M USD to 12M USD. I work in Higher ed.

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.

farseer · 5 months ago

I think the following quote summarizes Broadcom's strategy with regards to VMWare:

"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...

sokoloff · 5 months ago

Broadcom turned up the heat on our pot fast enough that we’re evacuating over to proxmox. I and several others in IT had run it at home for a while, so when Broadcom made the definite losses to continue on VMWare far higher than the likely losses from any migration outage, it became a no-brainer to migrate.

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…

bluGill · 5 months ago

I place Broadcom higher. At least Oracle seems to want customers that pay. I can't find evidence that of Broadcom wanting customers.

polski-g · 5 months ago

The CEO explicitly said the only customers they're interested in is the 600 customers who are responsible for 80% of their revenue. The are actively trying to shed all others; it's simply not worth the overhead costs otherwise.

tracker1 · 5 months ago

I'd throw IBM in that list as well... Unless you literally have money to burn, I've avoided Oracle and IBM for decades.

gnopgnip · 5 months ago

I work for an MSP, mostly with small to medium companies. Licensing costs went up a ton when broadcom acquired vmware. They went up a ton more this year with minimum core counts, current licensing costs are roughly $20k a year minimum. They might hike the price again, even medium businesses that see some value in avoiding an expensive migration want to avoid this uncertainty. Basically they don't want to deal with small and medium sized businesses. I'm sure large businesses are facing price hikes too but I don't have experience with that.

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.

anakaine · 5 months ago

My organisation went down the Nutanix path with about 1/4 of the DC about 18 months ago. They're now just finalising the move away feom Nutanix. From a server and dev admin point of view we had really odd VM behaviour, poorer than expected process performance, and random instability that just couldn't be resolved. I believe other system owners had similar and that the VM admins had their own range of oddities to track down. Something behind the scenes was the catalyst for change away in a short period of time.

inemesitaffia · 5 months ago

What did you choose to replace?

cookiengineer · 5 months ago

Check out libvirtd based stacks, because that's what's supported by upstream Linux.

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...

Cockpits SSH/multiple machines feature is being deprecated though unfortunately

stoitsev · 5 months ago

I'm with a block storage vendor that works with a lot of companies migrating off VMware, and the diversity of KVM-based cloud management platforms we're seeing is fascinating. We have customers moving to OpenNebula, CloudStack, Proxmox, OpenStack, HP VME, Oracle Virtualization, and even some homegrown solutions. The common thread is that they're all looking for a storage backend that is not tied to a specific hypervisor and can deliver predictable high performance. The beauty of the KVM ecosystem is the freedom to choose the best tool for the job, and that extends to the storage layer. A good software-defined block storage solution should have the features (data migration, disaster recovery) and capabilities to make the transition away from VMware as smooth as possible.

erredois · 5 months ago

Openstack second wind was definitelly not on my 2020s bingo card. But I agree kvm solutions have a lot of momentum.

Nux · 5 months ago

Microsoft gaining the most I reckon.

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.

tstrimple · 5 months ago

I'm seeing a fucking ton of cloud migrations to Azure and AWS from VMware. Even cloud VMs are pretty cheap compared to Broadcom licensing.

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