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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

First on my wish list would be for this "open source" hypervisor to be able to read any existing virtual disk format. This is without a doubt the one thing that makes us all hesitate to move from one hypervisor to another. Yes, there is software to convert from one format to another, but if you have a lot of VMs to migrate, this will take a lot of time and can be a source of errors. I'm a longtime user of VMware workstation. I work as a software consultant and for each customer, I have a VM that is strictly used only for that customer's work. When I travel to a customer's site, I copy their VM to bring with me and run that VM on my laptop. It is so much easier to transport a VM with VMware workstation than any existing Type 1 hypervisor. So, simplify migration to this new platform. I would like a Type 1 hypervisor that could do what MS Windows does. If you have enabled Hyper-V, the main O/S is loaded as a VM, but it is treated as a special case, allowing it access to the H/W as if it weren't a VM. For this "dream" open-source hypervisor it would be great if you could configure any VM to be set as your main VM, while the others run in the background.

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

damn this interview was gooooood. 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.

The nonprofit sector has been suffering as well. VMware’s philanthropic program was killed last October and the community has been so reliant on it. Would love to connect to Tom to understand more about cutting over to XCP-NG or Proxmox

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

I've been nudging my boss to move over to XCP-NG for work. He mentioned how crazy some of the price hikes have been and how expensive it is.

It use to be CA was where technology went to die. Broadcom said hold my beer, and they're now where technology goes to die.

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.

Unraid does have native Docker support in the OS, installing containers in just a few clicks in the UI.

Nice deep conversation. Great job!

I'm trying to move off of VMware, managing IT for a small/medium business. I'm having to spend the time to re-evaluate our virtualization. My concern with XCP-NG is that it will branch again to enterprise subscription, and then the open source would get killed off. I don't know what will be safe for the next 10 years.

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.

Thanks for a very interesting and informative video!

I love the basic interface on XO and the windows client for that matter

Great video, thanks 🎉

Glad I learned Linux KVM in the home lab at the same time as needing to move to vmware at work (I did it when only vmware did windows vm's) (yes, it was EARLY). Too bad that's maintained by RedHat 😮

This (Open vs Closed) is an interesting conversation, particularly where RedHat and Google appear to be slowly closing their source now. I personally find myself torn. There are, I think, concerns about sustainability. If lazy people can grab the code and spam the market with cheap knockoffs, without contributing to the actual development, the organization actually doing the work starves. How do you protect against that? And I get that having the source open can protect against it getting shelved, and allows more eyes to look for bugs, etc..., but CAN and WILL are two entirely different things. Seems like it can create a false sense of security in some instances.

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

I really hope XCP-NG will have good HCI solutions especially for virtual SAN solution like Vsan from VMware. Proxmox has native support for CEPH for this

I don’t think people are mad enough. We all should be pissed.

VMware closing off the free software is a lost a lot of people to learn the software to recommend it. Vmware wrote their own death. I deployed and supported VMware forever in both single ESXI hosts and clusters. Now I can say I can do the same thing with XCP-NG and KVM. In my opinion, Docker and LXC belong in VM's. It's safer and keeps troubleshooting at the guest os. Keep the hypervisors doing what they do which is management of resources and migrations if something goes wrong.

There was talk of open sourcing VMware's ESXi. However, it was considered a large effort to clean up the code to be presentable for the public and redo all the build, CI/CD, etc. Ultimately management teams saw no benefit in the act.

Question, between all the of open source vm's xcp-ng is the lead candidate to replace vmware at most companies, there will be an immediate need for more customer business & technical communication, NOT troubleshooting, asking and responding to business and technical wants and needs. Their has to be a training program for Engineers and Admins. although it is very similar to vmware,, business want and need assurance for the competent technical staff. I see nothing about technical certs or proof of training???? Vmware just handed over MOST of it customers mid size and small customers. maybe even some of the large/mid size customers as the pricing is insane unless you are a datacenter.

While I can agree to some extent that not having good CLI skills may not exactly be the most important factor when evaluating a candidate for a job in IT in whatever capacity, experience suggests that such candidates usually are the worst performers in every IT team I have worked at because they just cannot grasp simple concepts such as automation and they just panic and don't know what to do when dropped onto a command line (which happens more often than not whether you care to admit it or not) so I at the very least expect them to display willingness to learn. If they don't, that's fine. No harm taken but I am content to part ways at that point if I am the one calling the shots. Make of that what you will.

Why am I finding info related to xcp-ng using older code or versions ??

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

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.

Think with the VMWARE's ESXI server issues that the other free Type 1 Hypervisors out there is going to develop more and try to be the next number 1 free Hypervisor out there. Welcome to open source free Type 1 Hypervisor war.

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).

Great video, btw I like the beard! what products do you use?

I appreciate the support being explored more in the conversation. Proxmox will struggle to be proper enterprise ready until they revisit their support options. 2 hour SLA during business hours is pretty bad, and limited support tickets for certain tiers is a bad look. It really only works when you don't need support, which for some is a perfectly fine business decision to make. The two prior videos for XCP-NG and Proxmox were great, though one thing that was missing for me was nested virtualization support for things like CML (Cisco Modeling Labs). Any idea on how well these work on recent releases?

I would l like to see a comparison of these platforms at scale. Each configured how best meets their needs, maybe VMWare on a Dell Rail stack, just fully configured. The others the same way. Proxmox on whatever hardware makes sense which with Debian probably means there are tons of choices. Then compare them even if they were all on the same hardware. We use VMWare where I work and I am no VMWare expert but my experience with it is it seems pretty clunky and I have always wondered if proxmox could fill the demand. I know the support isn’t the same but just like kubernetes, if it works even though you have to build up a lot of “environment” around it, people still use it. The VMWare guys I know say proxmox can’t do the job but don’t explain why. I get the corporate problems of being the one taking the risk isn’t good. I guess I will wait and see. If there really is a vacuum here then whatever the real contender is will get forked, change, get financing, bought or whatever to meet the need. It makes me wonder if proxmox is being run at scale in a large install, I just don’t know.

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?

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?

i love the idea of xcp-ng and have gotten quotes for it but the only thing stopping me from migrating to it is the 2tb vdisk limit. All my NVR's have large vdisks and I cant do iscsi direct mapping because they are built and running so I cant move them over from vmware. Once they solve that issue I can move till then I am going to have to go to Hyper-V.

What was that podcast Tom was listening to about navigating Bloodhound? Id like to add that to my listen list

So is there a 1:1 comparable application similar to VMware

Can you provide feedback on XCP-NG limits to 2TB drive space. I am VMWare and have systems with storage 3+TB. Would this not work in XCP-NG? Promox states it can handle 16TB. Please let me know what your experience is.

3111 are these projects really open source projects if their is no developer community ?

what about openstack

Where is this Zen Orchestra Fat Client you speak of?

Proxmox all the way

Wish they would just merge and form the company we need

Broadcom the high tech metals recycler.

You can coat the motherboard to be water proof 😂

As to Kubernetes: It's kinda obvious that both of you don't really work with it much. It's a very important field to support though. Especially in the world of multi cloud. Saying that having no Kubernetes integration could ne seen as a net positive is just not understanding what it is you're talking about. Having Kubernetes integration does not mean being able to control the cluster from within the GUI, but the other way around. What i mean specifically is the csi driver for example. To provide storage into Kubernetes you'll need a csi driver. Having a driver for proxmox and or xcpng would be great. It's a big miss right now. At least the proxmox community seems to be creating that right now

[Title] *Open Source Hypervisors* Why not virt-manager with minimal headless linux install??

Small virtualization environment and I'm in the same boat. I can say for sure I've ruled out VMware, but I'm leaning XCP-NG. I've looked at Scale and Nutanix and I'm not a fan of locked in hardware.

Unless you have a tech KZfaq channel, don't expect the same treatment or support as Tom does from XCPng.

I've been doing IT for a couple of decades and I've never touched Linux. I write code, C#, Python, and others. I don't want to be required to use a command line for my VM stack management. I configure my firewalls via GUI if possible. Why would I not if all the same options are there? We do exist out there in the IT world. Thanks for the video.

Me second

ME FIRST!!!

KVM? Hello?

You've tested all these solutions but you totally skipped over HyperV most organizations with an Enterprise agreement will most likely move to HyperV.