[bluedino]

It's the ecosystem.

Sure, your organization is spending another million dollars on VMware this year, but what are the options?

* Your outsourced VMware-certified experts don't actually know that much about virtualization (somehow)

* Your backup software provider is just now researching adding Proxmox support (https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/22/veeam_proxmox_oracle_...)

* A few years ago you 'reduced storage cost and complexity' by moving to VMware vSAN, now you have a SAN purchase and data migration on your task list

* The hybrid cloud solution that was implemented isn't compatible with Proxmox

* The ServiceNow integration for VMware works great and is saving you tons of time and money. You want to give that up?

* Can you live without logging, reporting, and dashboards until your team gets some free time?

[zozbot234]

With a million dollar per year to play with, you should ultimately be able to replace all of these. Especially since it's not like Proxmox is lacking its own third-party support options (but it being built on FLOSS tech still leaves you with a lot more flexibility).

[technion]

I'll agree in theory but to play devil's advocate:

* I did the VCP4 and 5 courses. It's entirely a sales certification. I mean it's a technical certification, but I've never run into anyone who certified for the purpose of running an organisation's tech. Rather, you certify for the purpose of your company being able to sell the product. Note also much of VMware's training focus lately has been on things outside their main virtualisation, like Horizon or their MDM product. * Accurate. But I don't think it'll be far off. * Proxmox does Ceph out of the box. I'll also add that it's very easy to manage, unlike vSAN. I'll further add that none of the VMware training and certifications I've ever done covered vSAN, all the courses assume someone bought a SAN. * All the "hybrid cloud" pushed at least by Microsoft completely assumes you're in Hyper-V and is irrelevant to VMware * I've consulted to an awful lot of VMware organisations and I've never seen servicenow integration in place. I'm sure it's relevant for some peopel.

[wkat4242]

Their MDM product was airwatch which was pretty amazing until VMware bought it and stopped developing core features in favour of cruft nobody wanted like vdi integration.

Now airwatch is surpassed even by Intune.

[oneplane]

All of those points would also assume:

* You are big enough to need that and actually implement it

* You have the budget to do so

* You actually have the need to do that in-house

If you are at that scale but you don't have the internal knowledge, you were going to get bitten anyway. If you are not at that scale, you were already bitten and you shouldn't have been doing it anyway.

[tlamponi]

> It's the ecosystem.

Definitively, and situations like the Broadcom one IMO just underline that as a company you should never ever get your core infra locked into proprietary vendors' ecosystem, as that is just waiting for getting squeezed out, which they can for the reasons you laid out.

> Your outsourced VMware-certified experts don't actually know that much about virtualization (somehow).

That should be a wake-up call to have some in-house expertise for any core infra you run, at least as a mid-sized, or bigger, company. Most projects targeting the enterprise, like Proxmox VE, provide official trainings for exactly that reason.

https://proxmox.com/en/services/training

> * Your backup software provider is just now researching adding Proxmox support (https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/22/veeam_proxmox_oracle_...)

Yeah, that's understandable, one wants to avoid switching both, the hyper-visors that hosts core-infrastructure and the backup solution that holds all data, often even from the whole period a company needs to legally save that.

But as you saw, even the biggest backup player sees enough reason to hedge their offerings and takes Proxmox VE very seriously as alternative, the rest is a matter of time.

> A few years ago you 'reduced storage cost and complexity' by moving to VMware vSAN, now you have a SAN purchase and data migration on your task list

No, you should rather evaluate Proxmox's Ceph integration instead of getting yet another overly expensive SAN box. As ceph allows you to also run a powerful and near indestructible HCI storage, but avoids any lock-in as Ceph is FLOSS and there are many companies providing support for it and other hyper-visors that can use it.

> * The hybrid cloud solution that was implemented isn't compatible with Proxmox. > * The ServiceNow integration for VMware works great and is saving you tons of time and money. You want to give that up?

That certainly needs more work and is part of the chicken and egg problem that backup support is (or well, was) facing, but also somewhat underlines how lock-in works.

> * Can you live without logging, reporting, and dashboards until your team gets some free time?

Proxmox VE has some integrated logging and metrics, and provides native support to send to external metrics server, we use that for all of our infra (that runs on a dozen PVE servers in various datacenters around the world) with great success and not much initial implementation effort.

So yeah, it's the ecosystem, but there are alternatives for most things and just throwing up your hands only signals to those companies that they can squeeze you much tighter.

[mavhc]

Your outsourced experts are actually just people with google.

Proxmox on zfs means zfs snapshot send/receive, simple. I made my own immutable zfs backup system for £5