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I realize there’s all sorts of Microsoft hate out there, mostly justified, but no one has mentioned hyper-v as a replacement for VMware. I’ve got a dozen or so machines running on a single VMware host and after the broadcom buyout decided to swap over, havent pulled the trigger yet as I’m using it to get a new server and wait for our support contract to end.
In the small/medium business space is proxmox a better bet?
I’m surprised I haven’t seen Nutanix mentioned at all here tbh. Direct competitor to VMware.
Hyper-V could literally suck my dick all day and I still wouldn’t use it if there’s a non-microsoft option that works. Not interested in being the test group for any more of their shit or get rug-pulled at the worst moment.
I’d say that if you tend to like Microsoft products, then hyper v. If you tend to be annoyed by then but like Linux, then proxmox is great. It manages to be a good blend of approachable with a GUI but also having solid API and cli that didn’t overly abstract things away from the underlying implementation
But if you aren’t really a Linux person, then I’d wager hyper v is the right direction.
I haven’t yet set up proxmox, but yeah, I think hyper-V would work well in a small to medium windows shop.
The negatives I found probably don’t apply
From my experience running heavily Hyper-V over the last 15 years, don’t be afraid of it, it’s worth the look. Especially for a single node like you’re talking, no reason not to in my opinion.
Proxmox is definitely on its way to become a viable replacement for sure. There’s also OpenShift from Red Hat which could be worth a look at as well.
Openshift kind of incidentally does virtualization almost begrudgingly. Red hat started to try to be a VMware competitor with ovirt but find VMware customers too stuck in their ways, then abandoned it to chase the cloud buzz word with open stack, but open stack was never that good and also the market for people who want to make their on premise stuff act like a cloud provider is actually not that big anyway. So they hopped on the container buzzword with open shift and stuck libvirt management in there to have an excuse for virtualization customers that there is a migration path for them.
Meanwhile proxmox scratched their head wondering why everyone was fixated on stacking abstraction layer upon abstraction layer on libvirt and just directly managed the qemu. Which frankly makes their stuff a lot more straightforward technically, and their implementation is a solid realization of the sort of experience that VMware provides. In fact much more straightforward than a typical VMware deployment, and easier to care and feed since it is natively Linux instead of an OS pretending not to be an os like esxi. It also is consistent to manage, unlike VMware where you must at least interact some with esxi but that’s deliberately crippled and then you have to do things a bit differently as you deploy center (which can be weirdly convoluted).
Another vote for Hyper-V.
I had a great experience with hyper-v. 2 nodes running about 60 vms for 7 years.
Give bhyve a try. Especially on illumos host.