Proxmox delivers datacenter manager beta that makes it a more viable VMware contender

Open source virtualization suite Proxmox has taken an important step towards becoming a stronger contender for those considering VMware alternatives by commencing beta testing for a datacenter management tool that can control multiple hardware clusters. Proxmox’s main offering is the Virtual Environment (PVE), a hyperconverged …

[Roj Blake]

Gartner

Well, if Gartner says that VMWare has better functionality, then I think we can all be confident that the alternatives will all work just fine.

[FIA]

Re: Gartner

But but but... they pulled that analasys out of their magic hat (or whatever it's called), it can't be wrong!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Gartner

Gartner insist it has four quadrants, so I guess it's a tricorn.

[Sudosu]

Re: Gartner

Funny, I always suspected it was a trebuchet launching automobiles into a carefully marked field over a blind bluff.

[FIA]

Re: Gartner

My hat it has four quadrants.

Four quadrants has my hat.

If it did not have four quadrants.

It would not be my hat.

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped using ProxMox 6 months ago because of stability and control issues that plagued me. It is really fragile. Once you get it working, all goes well, but make a change and boom you are recovering the host from backups (Or spending hours rebuilding a new install.) My Home Lab was on HPE Enterprise gear with flash storage and ran VMWare for years without issue. They need to fix those issues before introducing new features.

I'm on Hyper-V now. Not thrilled with it, but if ProxMox isn't stable enough for my Home Lab, it isn't stable.

[Mr.Nobody]

What issues?

What stability issues did you run into?

I have a five node cluster running a mix of linux and Windows (mostly linux) for a test bed, and have only had a recent issue with migrating VMs off to other nodes as part of a reboot. It seemed to be a bug that they have resolved and it was easily mitigated by putting the hosts in maintenance mode before rebooting or applying patches, which we'll do in future now.

Other than that, it's been quite stable.

The Hyper-v cluster I am also running as a POC to get off of VMware has had several dumb issues with migrations, one of which required me to press and hold the power button on the ilo to get it to crash the VM stuck migrating to another host. This was after I paused it to migrate the two VMs off of it gracefully.

[SVD_NL]

My experience is very different. I've been running 3 proxmox clusters on varying hardware (from repurposed laptops to Dell PowerEdge servers) and I've had 0 instability issues. Some of them use Ext4, others ZFS.

I've never felt the need to be super careful when running updates, except for major versions, and for those they provide good documentation.

For config changes i'm mainly very careful not to mess up my cluster communications, that can be a pain to restore (but usually sorted in less than an hour), but other than that i haven't had any issues. I do try to avoid editing the config files directly where possible, doing it that way takes away most guardrails. But sometimes i need to, and it's a nice feature that it uses native linux config files.

[eugenefvdm]

I have the opposite experience

I've been running Proxmox for around 5 years on production workloads for clients. At first one host, around 30 VMs. Then two hosts, around double the amount of VMs.

Then a cluster, two new hosts 1600 KMs apart in another data centre. Now 5 hosts and 99 VMs. Total size 128 vCPUs. 912 GB RAM, 70:TB storage.

Live migrations across the wire without downtime. I used iSCSI NAS. Not a single problem ever. Zero downtime. Perfect backups on PBS. Proxmox isn't home lab but mature enterprise built on the most solid of Linux distributions

It helps that I'm a power user but the software is so easy to use and the community is fantasticly helpful and professional. Best of all cost - exactly $0. Huge profit, growth and stability for our firm.

[Sudosu]

Rule 1 - always make sure all your nodes are in the hosts file of all the other nodes.

Rule 2 - make sure your time is syncing correctly on all nodes.

[FIA]

The only thing I've found using it as a home lab is if you put too much I/O load on the proxmox system drive you can end up tripping the watchdog which is set at 10 seconds by default. This causes a 'random' reboot. See here for more info.

[Sudosu]

Yeah, I could see that happening.

I have been using ancient Intel SSD's for my system drives and have not pushed it hard enough to max them like that, so far at least.

[Anonymous Coward]

All very well. But I have Proxmox on my cv

and yet the call never comes.

[Kurgan]

Re: All very well. But I have Proxmox on my cv

This is because people insist on listening to the "Analists". In my small business world (I'm an IT consultant for around 30 customers) PVE is used extensively because it works and it's cheap.

[sedregj]

Re: All very well. But I have Proxmox on my cv

Well you are anon - how the hell does anyone call you?

I've migrated the vast majority of my VMware customers to Proxmox and all is fine.

Do bear in mind that Proxmox is just a distro on top of Linux and Debian. Its KVM and Qemmu on the virty side and that runs way, way, way more workloads than VMware could possibly dream of.

If you are holding it wrong then that is your problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Proxmox is just a distro on top of Linux and Debian.

Also highlighted on my cv.

Maybe I should have said I am 59 with 35 years experience. Might have made more sense then.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Proxmox is just a distro on top of Linux and Debian.

If you're trying to impress the AI screening bot, perhaps you should say you're 35 with 59 years of experience.

[sedregj]

Bye bye VMware

I was a VMware fanboi for a good 20 years. I even have a VCP 4 from when it has ESX - RedHat n stuff or ESXi (basically Linux but less RH branding and a few bits n bobs chucked out)

vCentre has been an abomination for ever. Windows service first with a fairly rapid phat client, then a Flash thing, then rewritten when Flash died out. Oh who can't recall the thrill of two web GUIs that were both rather wank for a good five plus years. Oh, the laughs we had with certificates and password expiration policies suddenly appearing after an update and I read release notes. I could go on.

In the meantime ESXi lurches from horror to horror. I wrote a wiki page on how to avoid multiple PSODs (its purple, baby) when passing a GPU through to a VM. Dell's mildly integrated Intel (or was it Broadcom) NICs around 2015 vanished every now and then. Recently ... oh who cares.

VMware was always about being a MVP. Fuck that.

Qemu/KVM runs so many VMs in the real world that VMware is a rounding error in comparison and a very expensive one at that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ho-Hum here we go again ... again !!!

I too was a VMWare fan ... only 'WAS' because it is getting harder & harder to cope with all the changes, the fact that virtually (pun intended) everyone is now too small to be worth VMWares(Broadcoms) attention or so it would seem and finally the 'random multiplier' that needs to be applied to your license/subscription/support costs.

Never really liked Hyper-V and its quirks ... but that is par for the course with MS stuff ... works BUT you need to learn all the 'gotchas to avoid' that the experts all know !!!

I am sure that VMWare can be replaced BUT it is going to be painful ... lots of new things to learn and recovery in worse case scenarios needs to be tested extensively to ensure everything works as intended.

I need to do some research on the alternatives and test out ease of use & stability !!!

I have never looked as Proxmox before as it seemed too 'Hands on' compared to VMWare, although I do like to get low-level and play !!!

:)