My VMware Replacement Choices

Almost everyone I know is looking for a VMware replacement. It's going to be a hot topic for a while and if you saw my last video you know I'm on the hunt too. For production virtual machine usage I am looking at ProxMox and Harvester. Both products have the full suite of capabilities for running clusters of servers and will allow me to run vdisks over 2TB in size. While XCP-ng will allow me to run over 2TB in raw I lose a lot of the capabilities and advantages of using virtualization by doing so. While I'll install and understand XCP-ng to help other who want to use it for my production use it will either be ProxMox or Harvester. I'm doing some more testing and we'll be doing follow up videos on the winner! It's worth noting that all three products do have commerical support available. I'll be making this choice very, very soon!

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[LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

You have the Citrix vs XCP backwards. Vates, the company behind XCP-NG & XO are working on their new storage update that supports over 2TB, not Citrix. Also, as you know, storing large amounts of data in a VM disk is not a good storage design.

[Practical-IT]

Great video. I've been a Proxmox user for 5+ years now. I am going to be interested in seeing how this whole transition goes.

[wouldntyouliketoknow]

im glad you recognized the limitations of any product with a purely command line interface. Like dont get me wrong, a CLI is a plus, but it should NOT be the primary way to interact with a product. A polished UI is the ONLY way that makes sense in modern business

[KentWillumsen]

Yep, I've just replaced ESXi with Proxmox for homelab. Only minor issue was high cpu with Frigate on Homeassistant vm, but was solved with putting Frigate in a separate container

[TVJAY]

I would love to see a video on Harvester. I personally use XCP-NG because the built in backup tool is awesome.

[jacobjohnson]

XCP is what im migrating towards. Also i believe Tom is right. I dont think bulk storage should be inside the vm itself..

[jlficken]

XCP-ng having the 2TB limit is a huge problem for them to grow in the market.

We have several VM's in production that have 5TB+ drives with at least 1 of them being 8TB.

I actually just set up a surveillance VM (Blue Iris) at work on Proxmox and even it has a 4TB single disk for storage.

[ajaaoka]

I agree with your conclusion for your needs. What most people will overlook because xcp-ng is the best system overall, is that very large file management with xen in general is designed to be run with a san or nas to manage large storage.

Your choices arent what Id choose in that situation but seems very appropriate for the scope of what you want to do/take on, and the amount of work necessary to do it

[rotaryconvert]

Been running Proxmox both single hypervisor and hyper converged HA for 8ish years. It’s a great product. Would be interesting to hear about alternatives.

[DaniedeJager]

I agree. Proxmox is something I can get behind and support.

[ShinyTechThings]

I've never used harvester, interesting...🤔 I was diagnosed with Hyper-V syndrome back in 2013. The Doc says it's not TERMINAL!🤦‍♂🤣

[LampJustin]

What you might not have on your radar is incus/lxd (incus being the fork of lxd due to canonical doing stupid things). It has a nice Gui and comes with many predefined OS templates while being able to start them as containers or VMs. Its clustering is pretty good and it does work with OVN to provide SDN features like load balancers and overlay networks. It's worth a try, but has to be installed and set up in the terminal first. Everything after that can be done through the GUI

[prhawkeye]

Harvester is the only way forward to me. It’s built with new technology in mind and its kubernetes native structure makes it even more enticing. I’ve used proxmox and it works great, I think people love to hold on to things and don’t like change. But I’m starting a new cluster at home, and I’m only considering Harvester at this point.

[LampJustin]

For me the only showstopper for harvester is longhorn. It's the csi driver they use for the vms. But if you're able to replace that with any other csi driver than it might be a good fit.

[mikeandersen]

Switched from VMware before the controversies, mostly because of resource-related reasons. Ended up with Proxmox, and so far I'm very happy with it. The only drawback in my opinion, is how docker/kubernetes is handled. Love the lxc containers, and uses them as much as I can, but containerd has to be run within an lxc or a vm -- no support directly through the Proxmox GUI for it.

[countnz]

1st Time i have every heard about Harvester :)... keep up the great videos... Myself i am useing Hyper-V on windows 2022 Datacenter. 128G ram. HP360P Gen8 2x8 Cure CPUs 32 Threads)

[fairsitetechnologies]

XCP-NG - been in it for a few years and Vates dev is releasing good stuff at an amazing pace - love it!

[TotallyNuss]

Proxmox. Never even heard of Harvester

[chuckowens]

Proxmox is a solid choice. I still feel like XCPng would win for me atleast for a business, but PBS is very nice and solid.

[bartjsmit]

Proxmox has a better GUI than XCP-NG which has some amateurish UX choices (90% white space, chunky icons, whole screen wizards). I'm also looking at oVirt as a FOSS KVM solution with a GUI that rises above just Cockpit. Any comments from those who have tried that one?