Making The Case for Open Source Hypervisors with Tom Lawrence!

In the post-vmware world we live in today, many people are evaluating where to turn next for their virtualization needs. In this video, I sat down with @LAWRENCESYSTEMS to discuss the viability of open-source hypervisors as an alternative to #vmware and other closed-source hypervisors available today. We touch on #XCP-ng and #Proxmox, their viability in business, the #homelab, whether a Broadcom-style takeover could happen to them, and much more!

A very special thank you to Tom Lawrence for taking the time to talk with me about these topics!

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[GuysTek]

Be sure to leave your comments for Tom and me below. In a few weeks, we'll answer them on the live show!

[Rood]

I thought my work would stay because we have such a large VMware structure. But Tuesday, the head VMware admin said he is evaluating option because it will be too expensive to stay where we are.

[nadtz]

Went from vmware/xen then later xcp-ng at work, when I finally got around to adding a vm host at home proxmox did take some getting used to but it wasn't that bad for a single host homelab. Having a working, easy to use gui without jumping through hoops was also nice *but* if my goal had been to replicate what I use or run into at work I'd have run something else, I specifically set out to learn proxmox because I wasn't that familiar with it but I kept hearing how good it had gotten and I'm happy I did.

[geneann]

You were talking about backups, but never mentioned Proxmox Backup Server for some reason.

[PowerUsr]

damn this interview was Lots of gems if you play close attention. How OSS projects work and the little intricties of it. Seriously this was good stuff. Its worth a second watch actually. Lots of game to soak up.

[MaxTheDog]

I love to use proxmox ve and proxmox backup server on my homelab. It helped me learn some Linux which I am happy to branch out of Windows and Apple. I am enjoying it a lot. I may look into other hypervisors to setup for fun though.

[mrljvb]

No detailed mention of Harvester.... I've been curious as it will integrate well with Rancher which I use for Kubernetes.

[ssyd]

At 34:47 you missed that Proxmox supports LXC containers natively in the hypervisor. I use it for some of my simpler services like a Pihole. Hell, even my fileserver runs in a container that I pulled down from within Proxmox where they include a bunch of Turnkey containers for all sorts of tasks, ready to run.
Edit: Whoops got keyboard rage and then Tom mentioned it a minute later lol

[robrjones]

I appreciated this video. Both of you have great perspectives and are reasonable in your approaches. We still don't know what we are going to do with our small environment of 6 ESXi hosts and about 360ish vm's. The backup "issue" is an issue. We have invested a lot in a solution that works well with VMWare. So, we'll have to figure that part out too. But thanks again for this and keep putting out the good stuff!

[gdchance]

It would be interesting to hear more comparing oVirt and/or Linux VM. But kudos from those of us that are moving away from VMware.

[garymackay]

As mentioned several very good options to run server vm’s. One piece I do not see much on is Virtual Desktops. What do I do with my VMware Horizon View clients? Microsoft’s Azure HCI is an option but crazy expensive. Is there anything in the Xcp-ng or Proxmox or ???? world to handle this?

[BrllyLSSJ]

I read that there is a 2TiB file size Limit for the virtual Disk (VHD format) in xcp-ng. Is there any chance, that it now gets faster updated to bigger sizes? Are they maybe adopting the vhdx format, which has a limit of 64TiB? 2TiB is too small to be considered for us as we got many file servers with bigger disks (some of them got even bigger than the 16TiB allowed by Proxmox).

[akurenda]

This will just mean that Vmware Professional Certs will be niche. Which will mean that you get more money for supporting it =). I'm glad this will allow companies to branch out to something other than vmware, though. XCP-NG and Proxmox are fantastic.

[Jordan-hzwr]

We switched from VMware to XCP-ng and couldn’t be happier with everything from XOA to the team on the forums.

[APHATMOUSE]

Where do we find the backup writeup that Tom mentioned having recently completed?

[johnharrison]

We are still stuck on VMware NSX since we haven't found anything that is opensource or come close to NSX. Any thoughts if XCP will be coming down with more tools or features sets?

[Mitchell]

One benefit of Veeam and others is application-aware support for things like Active Directory, SQL and other systems that a good chunk of enterprises rely on.

Still to see that elsewhere.

[brodriguez]

Comes down to, are there any alternatives to all things VMware? License is secondary since this bad news didn't leave much time for changeover. Past that the open vs close becomes more important.

[kuhndj]

I had a quote for another three years of sns on my small cluster but didn’t get it ordered in time so needed to refresh the quote post-acquisition… quote went up 25% to over $200k, so now I’m evaluating alternatives and Broadcom will need to recover another $150k from the whales just to break even.

[thetux]

As a former vmware staff member I'm running my home lab on proxmox (and nest some vsphere labs on it if needed). But on a professional level I'm not too sure. How're you guys approaching the issue that basically no major server vendor (Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Cisco, ...) offers official OS support for Debian/Proxmox? That's a hard sell for business critical use cases.