If you're on the VMWare Platform, what are you doing now?

[Space_Ranger]

Looks as though the Broadcom's completion of the acquisition of VMWare, and their deciding to kill off perpetual licensing, what are your plans going forward if you're in the ESXi world?

I myself, working for a non-profit organization, can't afford the per-core-a-year pricing they've introduced. I'm looking at either migrating to ProxMox or XCP-ng. Time to get the test lab up and running and see which is more compatible with our environment.

 

[Grimlakin]

We're for the time being sticking with vmware. BUT after this upgrade cycle we will seriously be considering MS's Hyper-V solution for our department. Depending on what the rest of the company does.

 

[Space_Ranger]

ProxMox just introduced automated ESXi to ProxMox migration (currently in their Testing Channel). I've started to play with both XCP-ng and ProxMox for ESXi migrations. Neither have been flawless but overall it hasn't been a horrible experience either. XCP-ng requires 8.3 Beta 1+ in order for their automated migrations to work (as there is a bug in the current 8.2.1 version in release. ProxMox requires 8.1.8+ with the pve-no-subscription and pvetest Repositories in place.

 

[Space_Ranger]

It's been 2 years, and I have been successful in migrating 66% of my hosts over to Proxmox thus far. The only thing holding me back so far is migrating my SQL clusters over, as they seem to be performing well on ESXi 7.0U3 still. I haven't found the magic sauce yet to make them as fast in Proxmox yet. I'm getting there, but not ready to make the move final yet..

Another side-effect of moving to Proxmox has been the managing of backups for my systems. Was able to secure my self a rather decent NAS unit with 16 drive slots. Filled them up with 14TB drives and have plenty of storage and redundancy to maintain backups on that now. We're a Non-Profit and while I'd love to have sufficient cloud storage for my backups, it's just not in the cards these days.