[stego-tech]

At PriorCo, I did a slide deck presentation of our options at the time (2023/2024) and pitched essentially three pathways: stay on VMware, move to Apache Cloudstack, or move to Nutanix. The deck was roundly ignored in favor of a lift-and-shift to AWS for remaining infrastructure.

If I were running the migration, my preferred pathway would’ve been to Apache Cloudstack. We had the expertise to pull it off, and it would’ve freed us from vendor partners. Nutanix was really only on the list purely from its technology portfolio; its lack of profitability and shifting towards SaaS for features like cost analysis meant that we’d be moving into a similarly bad situation as VMware at the time (wholly beholden to their business priorities instead of our own), which I didn’t care for.

There’s a lot of options out there, most of which are built atop either KVM/QEMU or OpenStack. Virtuozzo’s offerings impressed me, but the lack of a “comprehensive” product was a turnoff. Oxide was incredibly interesting from a simplicity and integration perspective, but the appetite wasn’t there to try a startup’s product. Microsoft and Oracle were both ruled out due to higher costs and more onerous licensing than VMware/Broadcom, while IBM/OpenShift were ruled out as our private cloud estate was 100% VMs with only ~20% of our internal products capable of containerization support.

The biggest advice I can give is to understand your workload today, and determine options accordingly. Everyone’s pitching K8s and containers, but if your estate is majority VMs, then a lot of those options just aren’t worthwhile.

[ecxzw]

Would you be considering Oxide in the future with their recent $100M Series B funding round, their recent sales to clients like Lawerence Livermore National Labs, and the recent AWS outage in mind?

[MaKey]

What's the reason for not considering Proxmox?

[SteveNuts]

They seriously need to invest in a well engineered multi node cluster filesystem. VMFS made VMware into the behemoth it is.

Without that your options for HA shared storage is Ceph (which proxmox makes decently easy to run), or NFS.

[garganzol]

My 2 cents: Proxmox is too rigid. For example:

1. Proxmox cannot even join a network using DHCP requiring manual IP configuration.

2. Disk encryption is a hell instead of checkbox in installer

3. Wi-Fi - no luck (rarely used for real servers, but frequently for r&d racks)

Of course, it is a Debian core underneath and a lot of things are possible given enough time and persistence, but other solutions have them out of the box.

[SirMaster]

My Proxmox seems to use DHCP just fine by putting "iface eno1 inet dhcp" in /etc/network/interfaces

[stego-tech]

Proxmox wasn’t considered because of the audience (leadership) and Proxmox’s perceived market (SMBs/homelabs). I couldn’t even get them to take Virtuozzo seriously, so Proxmox was entirely a non-starter, unfortunately.

FWIW, I use Proxmox at home. It’s a bit obtuse at times, but it runs like a champ on my N100-based NUCs.