Broadcom / VMware debacle

[m.novelli]

Any VMware Partner here thinking to switch to another hypervisor after Broadcom debacle? And maybe explore also third-party backup solutions moving from Veeam?

VMware Channel Partner news seems to be worst day after day

ESXi + Veeam Backup is still the best combo, but if get too pricey...

Gostev are you thinking to support Proxmox or Sangfor?

Marco

[tinto1970]

thanks for the post. I don't know Proxmox very well but I think it could be a good player in the future.

About Sangfor: we should not forget that it's a chinese company. All chinese companies are under control of the government, and they could be asked (with no chance to refuse) to insert malware/spyware/CommandAndControl in their software.

[m.novelli]

Good point against Sangfor

Marco

[m.novelli]

I'm working in SMB market since 20+ years and I think that in today world the hypervisor should be a commodity, rock solid, easy to install / manage / upgrade and ESXi is perfect on this side. vCenter a little less, it gave me too much issues during upgrades in the last years. Never used other VMware products.

So in my mind Microsoft Hyper-V is not the way to go, too much time / effort to upgrade / patch

I've never used Nutanix or Red Hat

Marco

[Mildur]

Hi Marco

Proxmox is something we are doing some early research on.
If you have any technical experience with it, please answer Anton Gostev's comment in the Proxmox topic.

Best,
Fabian

[m.novelli]

Unfortunately zero experience with Proxmox but I’ll start to follow the relative thread, thanks

[Gostev]

You may also want to check out Oracle Linux KVM. This looks to be the direct continuation of Red Hat Virtualization. Remember back when Red Hat dropped a ball on RHV, I immediately predicted that some other major vendor will pick one up, because "the sacred place is never empty". And Oracle did just that.

Veeam will support Oracle Linux KVM in the next immediate update of our RHV backup capability, which will also be rebranded accordingly.

[Gostev]

And this is the management platform for same > Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager

[m.novelli]

Thanks Gostev, at this turn I would like to avoid BIG IT Devils (Microsoft / Amazon / Broadcom / Oracle / Dell / HPe...) since they care only about Enterprise Customers

I'm looking for a product from a middle sized IT Company that still take care and listen the customer base
Hoping that doesn't get acquired by aforementioned BIT IT Devils

Marco

[coolsport00]

I'm also in the SMB space...have been my whole IT career (25+yrs); and, like you @m.novelli am interested in getting started on adopting other hypervisors. I was able to procure probably what was the last of the perpetual/socket licensing last Aug. So now is a good time to start playing with something else.

Of course the biggest thing is does/will Veeam support whatever it is I look into? At this point, Oracle or Proxmox look to be at least worth looking into. I'm open to other hypervisor potentials from anyone who's looked into others. And agreed...I don't think HV is worth the effort. I personally am not against "big players", as long as updates & QA is good, and supportability is good. And, they don't make moves like VMware is currently doing....

Shane

[tyler.jurgens]

If you're looking at just simply 'yet another hypervisor' there are many to choose from, all with their benefits/drawbacks.

The biggest challenge any company that has invested in more than just a hyper-visor with VMware will find is that no one else has the depth of products VMware has. Want to replace your core router, storage, and hypervisor? VMware can do that. Not only can VMware do that, you have a wide depth of industry players out there that support extending VMware's capabilities. Want backups, replication, security, etc? Most vendors integrate well with VMware (see Veeam).

I do hope another industry player comes along that can do the same things VMware does, with the same quality and maturity VMware does. Equally important, we need the entire ecosystem out there to support it. Its cool to see Veeam looking at providing that support for other platforms. It can only help the larger industry as a whole.

[coolsport00]

Tyler -
You make good points...some of which pertain mostly to Enterprises. SMBs don't use NSX (that I'm aware of; I'm sure there's some out there); I would also bet there is rare SMB usage of vSAN. vSphere/vCenter is mainly it. Integration, maturity, etc...no one can spar with VMW in that regard. It's true. Will anyone ever get there? Hmm...hard to say, but if I had to guess, I doubt it.

It is a big deal to look at another HV for sure -> time, expertise, feature-set it does/doesn't have, integration, etc. But, VMW is forcing our hand to do so. It's a real headache not needed imo. Would/will we move to another solution? Maybe. At this point, it's at least worth looking to do so. Whether it actually happens is yet to be decided.

With Oracle's resources, they have a chance to do something with what they just purchased. I, like you, would like to see at least another player in the industry. HV seemed like it had a chance early on, but MS let their product go. No continual feature enhancements. Meh.

[ober72]

Just to add to the fray, on the Monthly ComptiaIsao call some of the folks were already talking about moving to https://xcp-ng.org/, which I had somehow missed. The challenge as you say Shane is the whole ecosystem or lack thereof. Then if Hypervisors start popping up all over the place you get into a "Linux distribution" scenario issue, i.e. which ones to support? Oracle looks interesting and I would expect that RedHat would try and take advantage of this situation.
On a side note I just recently installed Proxmox on my home lab and it has been very intuitive to run.

[coolsport00]

Thanks for sharing Geoff. Before this post, I never heard of XCP-ng So, there's at least 1 good thing about all this VMW "mess"...learning about new hv's out there

[tmoehle]

I'd be glad if Veeam would explore compatibility with Proxmox. At least with the current trajectory I'm not sure that my small/medium business clients will continue to license VMware, but it would be awesome if we could continue to use Veeam and maybe even use it during the transition.

[nka]

I've never used Nutanix or Red Hat

Nutanix is pretty good, it's rock solid, update sameless, everything work very nicely... the only problems are with compatibility (and renewall princing in fact). I've faced some manufacturer that didn't have any support or appliance for Nutanix (mostly only VMware), so I had to do a "custom" install to make it work. Backup and recovery plans are a little different... for example, Veeam dosent support everything from Nutanix into their "Cloud", so I had to build a Hardened Repository to be able to backup everything correctly. The way it work make it hard to "upgrade" too, cause you basicaly need to change the 3 nodes so they can sync correctly. Migration between cluster is not very "easy" (like in vmware), but does work very nicely between nodes (in fact, you don't really have to do it, it's all automated).

[billcouper]

Based on the availability of paid support in our regions time zone, we have decided to migrate from Hyper-V and VMware to XCP-ng (using XOA for management). We are using Veeam Agent to protect these workloads, however it would be ideal if Veeam could add support for VM backup of XCP-ng virtual machines!

[Moopere]

... HV seemed like it had a chance early on, but MS let their product go. No continual feature enhancements. Meh.

I see a lot of VMWare and FOSS folks hating on Hyper-v .. but I just don't understand it in the commercial sense, particularly not in the SMB space. SMB's need solid products that don't cost the earth. Hyper-v is such a product, There is nothing I can think of in SMB land that isn't provided by Hyper-V.

As far as 'no continual feature enhancements' - this is a huge plus in my world. I'm not even sure its true tbh, but certainly I've not bothered to do much investigation of any Hyper-V product enhancement since about WS2012R2. The basic feature set is there and it mostly just works. There is no additional cost over the cost of Windows server and SMB's are extremely likely to be running WS - so its basically free.

Now, for those not running WS in their SMB offices - sure, knock yourself out and install whatever is available out there, but I actively avoid sites like this as they are invariably a mess of disconnected software horridly out of date - and the reason is resource availability - SMB's just don't have the budget to employ a team of IT admins constantly tinkering with stuff.

If however we're talking about home-labs, well, thats a different story - and what IT admin doesn't like getting their hands dirty with whatever is the new stuff or non mainstream stuff? We all do. But if you're billing your time, its a different game.

[nathano]

but I just don't understand it in the commercial sense, particularly not in the SMB space. SMB's need solid products that don't cost the earth. Hyper-v is such a product, There is nothing I can think of in SMB land that isn't provided by Hyper-V.

I agree. we are a small provider and only use the very basic features of VMware, no virtual networking, no virtual routing, just VMs in a HA cluster with LACP on the network side of things for redundancy to our switch stack. A simple HV cluster should work just fine for us. we have FC storage so migrating to HV should be relatively straight forward and totally remove a not insignificant VMware bill each month.

[norman.fackler]

I recommend Nutanix AHV with Robo Edge license for SMB customers. Good price/performance ratio and seamless migration from ESXi and / or Hyper-V.

[hushpuppies]

I would not suggest jumping into fences just because the owner of VMWare changed.
Right now, AFAIK, current contracts remain untouched. So there is time to plan a possible change and migration.
Many others have the same problem, so there will be some kind of best practices with an array of tested alternatives sooner or later.

Don't forget that you all have running systems which work and have worked in the past.
Costs are surely important, but giving up a solid and working environment will cost something, too.
Just imagine how much it would cost, if some of your central VMs aren't available for a day or even a few hours, because you have migrated to some other solution.
Or ask the administrations of cities migrated from Windows to Linux, because it's basically the same - they all realized, it isn't. License costs saved on the one hand, much more IT support and labour absences on the other hand.

I'm surely no fan of companies like Broadcom which buy other firms simply because they can and using their market weight to max out profits.
Since Adobe started this some years back with their dreaded subscription models, it found many followers doing the same today. Veeam is unfortunately one of them, too.
But: There's always been a counter-wave with companies offering similar products still for a fixed price or subscriptions with realistic pricing.
I suspect, something like this will happen in the hypervisor sector, too.
So keep calm

[rohitsb]

Whoever isn't exploring and adoption an opensource strategy may find themselves in the same situation in future.

Opensource cloud management platforms (CMPs) such as Apache CloudStack can be great choice for SMB as well as very large users. Apache CloudStack currently has a transition path wherein it can ingest an existing VMware ESXi/vCenter based infra allowing VCD users and others an immediate path of moving to CloudStack, and upcoming CloudStack release support an offline VMware to KVM VM-migration path which allows ESXi users to migrate their workloads to KVM. CloudStack supports any EL distro (RHEL/OL8/9, SUSELinux etc) and Ubuntu as KVM hosts, and has support for various storage options. For backup and recovery, CloudStack supports Veeam via a B&R driver (latest has support for version 11 and 12), and also supports several other B&R plugins for KVM such as EMC networker, backroll (Borg-based); at work we can also help write B&R and other extensions as required by user organisations (https://www.shapeblue.com/cloudstack-so ... gineering/). CloudStack has a history of 10+yrs of development and release only under the ASF under the Apache License, this is best way to secure an organisation's infra interests and defend against any increase of total cost of ownership. Everyone can include CloudStack during their discovery, exploratory phase and consider it during decision making, several SMBs and large organisations in the world are CloudStack users.

More reading - https://www.shapeblue.com/apache-clouds ... ternative/

Disclosure - I'm a long time active committer and PMC member of Apache CloudStack and author of the B&R framework and Veeam B&R plugin in CloudStack. At work I help secure our customer interests and drive engg team to deliver value. At work, we don't have a commercial distribution of Apache CloudStack so we don't have a product to sell, but we make money by our support and engg services, following our transparent and opensource ethos as an employee owned company: https://www.shapeblue.com/get-in-touch/

Regards,
Rohit Yadav

[EWMarco]

@hushpuppies: Current contracts remain unchanged? What?

As far as I am aware, all current contracts have been killed at the end of April or something along those lines. Ours certainly has been terminated.


I have not been in the SMB space in the last decade, at least not according to the licensing level I worked under with Vmware. So SMB mileage may vary but I would very much caution anyone away from HyperV. Microsoft is not fond of HyperV even existing. Development in that regard basically happens when they'd otherwise be liable for damages and nothing else. I've worked for a company that ran about 300 hosts and 10k VMs on HyperV and from my personal point of view, that thing is a nightmare. If you only need a few hosts it's manageable but I'd have to ask if your time was worth nothing to you.

I have absolutely NO experience with Oracle or Proxmox at this point but if I had to wager, I'd go with Oracle. The fact that they are greedy renders hope to the fact that they might put in the resources to make their product competitive. You'll also feed yet another of the same evil corporate types that will do the same to you as Broadcom is now doing the moment they get that leverage (and have in the databse realm for decades). I would prefer Proxmox enter that space, but that would be a gamble. SMB could probably do it as you're not as dependent on management tools as we are in the provider space.

So if you all want to do the world a favor, go Proxmox, give it the uptick in market share it needs to break that glass ceiling. The moment they produce viable central management and good backup APIs, I'll gladly gnaw my boss an ear off over switching .

EDIT: I just started watching a video about Proxmox backups on 45drives. The man said snapshots are known to have the potential of data corruption for the VM. So that made me quite uncomfortable and upon further googling, it seems that having to deal with corrupter VMs after backups is not an uncommon occurrence. So that puts a damper on my Proxmox enthusiasm .

[hobbit]

We've already begun using Proxmox in parallel to our VMware+Veeam setup (even before the Broadcom issue).

Up to now the big hindrance in doing the full switch on our next hardware refresh is indeed the comfort that Veeam offers for the VMware platform. Proxmox support on the Veeam side would be very much appreciated.

[ITP-Stan]

Hyper-v is such a product, There is nothing I can think of in SMB land that isn't provided by Hyper-V.

To properly set-up Hyper-V you must use it without the Windows GUI, core server install they used to call it.
But then to manage it, was a hassle to setup since the Hypervisor was not domain joined (rightfully so).
And even without the GUI you stilll have to do Operating System updates for it, but more difficult, since no GUI etc.
I've seen my fare share of Windows Updates go horribly wrong.
When it's a single VM, you either find a solution or restore from back-up.
When it's your Hypervisor you're left with trying to fix it, or reinstalling the OS and configuring it all over to get all your VM's back to working fashion.
And my last point, I've seen Unix and Linux systems running rock stable for years without a reboot, I'm not confident Windows can do that.

My points might all be because lack of recent experience with HyperV, and maybe even some bias or misunderstanding from my side.
Depending on how things go with Vmware or with Veeam adding Hypervisor support, I might have to seriously start trying Hyper-V again in the foreseeable future.

[dips]

We've already begun using Proxmox in parallel to our VMware+Veeam setup (even before the Broadcom issue).

Up to now the big hindrance in doing the full switch on our next hardware refresh is indeed the comfort that Veeam offers for the VMware platform. Proxmox support on the Veeam side would be very much appreciated.

How are you finding it so far? What are you using to backup the VMs?

[aceit]

About Sangfor: we should not forget that it's a chinese company. All chinese companies are under control of the government, and they could be asked (with no chance to refuse) to insert malware/spyware/CommandAndControl in their software.

Well the same can be said for Lenovo, the biggest pc manufacturer?
And companies born from russian devs?
That is quite a statement... and can be said about any system, even USA ones, not open to public scrutiny (closed source). Just to say, agencies had direct access to Twitter, as said by the new owner. And not talking about Facebook, at least users they know and are willing to be spied

Regarding software/hardware, it is a costly endeavour, and the world is polarizing toward what someone called (agree with him or not) technofeudalism, owned by big funds/finances with basically infinite cash, leasing stuff and that buys companies (which first had grown with reasonable relationships and convenient licenses for their customers) once they become big enough.

said that ... well Broadcom is not so bad engineering wise ... they bought in the past also Symantec... we can hope at least for a good integration between vmware and and the security stack

In time, without changing suppliers, I find myself, from three suppliers, having just one... had FC switches, vmware and symantec I hope at this point for a family discount bundle... c'mon Broady at this point buy Veeam too

[RobinPGI]

I've not used VMware for years (I think v5.1/5.5 was the last time), and having seen various issues posted here about code quality and upgrades/updates that break stuff, I'm happy that I've been using Hyper-V.

Rather like Veeam, it just works. I've been using Hyper-V since 2008 R2, and fully intend to keep on using it until something significant happens to change my mind.

Updates are super easy and just take care of themselves. You can use Cluster Aware Updating, or just schedule servers to install/reboot at different times. Set it and forget it. I've been running at some scale and not had any update-related issues on Hyper-V in the last ten years or so. Understandably, the people who do have problems make a lot of noise about it! This is on mostly Dell but also HP hardware.

Clustering is easy, and also just works. There's not even any need for AD to form a cluster these days, though a dedicated AD makes management easier. I'm not using SCVMM, only regular Failover Cluster Manager, Hyper-V Manager, and of course PowerShell now and then. I found I had to "unlearn" some of the complications that VMware made me learn, and re-think about my understanding of how underlying technologies (e.g. network) really work and why virtual is different (or not!). It also made me think about if having a platform that's not Windows (which I know very well), not Linux/BSD (which I know well enough), is a good idea, and if that's a useful thing to be spending time learning/maintaining knowledge of, in addition to everything else.

Another nice benefit is that you have the exact same hypervisor running inside Windows 10/11 on your desktop, which makes some things really easy & consistent, depending on your use cases. Licensing is also easy, as if you're running Windows VMs then you've probably already got Datacentre licences for all your hosts. So you just stop paying for VMware. If you want to do VSAN then you already have Storage Spaces Direct licenced with datacenter, so no extra charge there either.

Don't forget that it also runs all of Azure. Makes it pretty easy to move VMs to/from the cloud if you think you might need to.

You can run your Hyper-V servers without the desktop, but to be honest, it doesn't make a huge difference, and just means that you do have a desktop there on the rare occasions you want to get on and poke at something locally. Microsoft and no doubt all MVPs will disagree with me, but there you go.

If you're not a fan of Windows generally, and don't already have decent Windows & PowerShell skills, it might not be for you

I am not in love with everything that Micrsoft does by any means, but Hyper-V has worked well for me for the last ten years.

[janschulenburg]

Based on the availability of paid support in our regions time zone, we have decided to migrate from Hyper-V and VMware to XCP-ng (using XOA for management). We are using Veeam Agent to protect these workloads, however it would be ideal if Veeam could add support for VM backup of XCP-ng virtual machines!

XCP is new to me but I would vote for this too. any alternative for VMware would be welcome!

[coolsport00]

For me, for now..my VMW licensing is fine. I'm running socket perpetual on v8, so I'm good till VMW releases some v9 product. I don't plan on migrating any of my production to anything new anytime soon. For a little while, I have time to play around (hopefully) with 1 or 2 other h/v's in the near future.

For the couple folks who shared good news about HV...well...glad it works well for you all, but I'm still not sold too much on it. For what VMW/Broadcom is doing, still may be worth looking into again (I haven't since it's early yrs before 'live migration' was implemented). @nathano - have you used HV recently?...ever?...or, just looking to begin a switchover now? What's your experience with it? Like you, we don't use many features with VMW. DRS & some affinity/anti-affinity rules, VMotion, SVMotion, and that's pretty much it. Big features for us though. No vSAN, NSX, Aria, SRM, Replication, etc.

If Proxmox has potential VM corruption issues with backup..hmm...then not sure how that can even be a possibility for anyone now, other than lab'ing. Maybe engineers for them can get that taken care of soon. May still at least give it a glance. @hobbit - have you had any VM corruption issues in your testing?

I briefly looked at XCP-ng. Looks like it could be a viable solution. Need to dive into it a bit though before saying much one way or the other.

Great thread though...enjoying all the diverse info.