XenServer teases free VMware migration package XenServer, the Citrix spin-out that will offer a hypervisor and associated management tools for x86 systems, has teased a plan to lure VMware customers as well as a little more detail about its plans to operate as an independent entity. The outfit's offerings are based on the Citrix products of the same name – XenServer – and …
That's the same Citrix which first made XenServer free/open source and then doing a 180 and closing it down again. If you think Broadcom is a poor steward of products then Citrix is a hundred times worse.
This aside, XenServer was a mediocre product even back in the days when Xen was still relevant, which is no longer the case (even large Xen proponents have given up on it, usually in favor of KVM which is where progress happens today).
Citrix might just as well be Broadcom at this point. The CEO of the new Citrix-Tibco smashburger is Tom Krause, former head of Broadcom's software business. His playbook is exactly the same as Hock Tan - price hikes and staff layoffs. He laid off 15% of the "Cloud Software Group" at the start of the year.
I stuck to PVE 7.4 and was able to get nVidia Grid vGPU shared amongst Ubuntu + Win 10 + Win 7 VMs. The trick to including Win7 was to install older Host driver V11.13 that could interface with much older Guest driver V10.4 (the last one still compatible with Win 7). Video card shared is the venerable 8GB Tesla P4.
… but the real reason to use Proxmox is the ZFS, with its built-in snapshotting, various redundant RAID schemes, backups, templates, containers. I’ve installed Sunshine 0.20 into all VMs running vGPU, when using H.265 encoding the VNC gigabit network streaming is excellent. Even over wi-fi!
… and I maintain complete control over all these vast resources using nothing but a decrepit 2015 Steam Link (running latest Moonlight) and Logitech K200 “media center” keyboard.
Good for you. But that's just a small home LAN which (from the sound of it) seems to be centered around media streaming and serving a handfull of VMs with little in them. Demands that are rather basic so pretty much anything should work here.
But that changes dramatically when your virtualisation solution has to run a cluster of servers with business-critical VMs. Proxmox' Swiss army knife approach has lots of holes which in the 6 months we trialled it gave us more headaches than even the Hyper-V solution it was meant to replace.
There's a reason why ESXi is still the go-to solution when it comes to enterprise virtualisation.
As they say, nobody ever got fired for buying ESXi. But that perspective prevents people from seeing good alternatives.
Of all the virtualization solutions available, only VMware and XCP-ng+XO provide complete end-to-end solutions that are not a bag of parts. XCP-ng has become my go-to virtualization solution, especially since Broadcom bought VMware
>> Of all the virtualization solutions available, only VMware and XCP-ng+XO provide complete end-to-end solutions that are not a bag of parts.
XCP-ng most certainly is "a bag of parts", as it doesn't even come with a management plane (there has been talk about XO Lite for years, with still nothing to show for it), and for this it also relies on an external entity (Vates, the guys doing Xen Orchestra). Like it does for other stuff, like proper storage (which XCP-ng doesn't have).
Even for a single virtualisation host, XCP-ng feels more cobbled together than ESXi (which goes from zero to ready in 5 minutes) or even an average KVM Linux distro (which these days comes with Cockpit, which isn't great but workable).
>> XCP-ng has become my go-to virtualization solution, especially since Broadcom bought VMware
As other have said, Xen has long been abandoned by all the relevant players in the virtualisation space. ESXi is likely to outlive XCP-ng even if Broadcom messes up royally, and any movement away from ESXi will most certainly go towards more modern and much better supported alternatives (KVM and KubeVirt), and not Xen.
Xen is as dead as the dodo. Hardly a platform that makes sense for new installations in a business environment.
I think if Xen is what you want, then XCP-NG + XenOrchestra could be an live alternative. I tried it for a while, but was a bit OTT for my simple home lab use case. Neither this nor Proxmox are as feature rich as VMware, but both systems claim to scale and as org's local VM footprints drop - increased SaaS, (and PaaS and IaaS) they may suit,
I use xcp-ng in production at three customer sites. The current version of XenOrchestra will import VMware virtual machines directly into XCP-ng and XO. I've imported several VMware virtual machines (Windows and Linux) and the only virtual machines that gave me trouble were when the guest OSs were more than five or six years old.
I agree with you that XO and XCP-ng are not yet as feature-full as VMware, but in my day-to-day use, there is no functional difference between the two except that I find XO much easier to work with than anything from VMware.
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