alt Hacker News> […] could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares.
As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago.
Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenStack is useful for many large scale environments (especially with tenant isolation and usage tracking/billing/chargebacks).
Proxmox is good a good solution for SMBs, but (especially pre-9.x) there were a bunch of things that made it much less usable for large(r) scale deployments IMHO.
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I have professional experience with all listed (both on vendor and user side), other than hyper-v. Nutanix is probably the closest true solution to VMware, although not 1:1. VMware is an excellent piece of tech run by people who DGAF and just want the $.
I like Proxmox a lot, but it is technically and commercially several years behind. There is no moat, and when stuff slides sideways, you need to understand what's going on (e.g a competent sysadmin). That is changing with the recent Proxmox NA announcement, but still not there.
OpenStack is not the same product at all, and is about an order of magnitude more complicated. Much more powerful, but instead of a good sysadmin, you probably want a team (and maybe some core devs).
I was working on a pretty big proxmox setup back in 2016...
I emphasize most, not all. Most companies using VMWare even 5 years ago could have achieved similar infrastructure using Proxmox. It's been a viable alternative for years. It's always intrigued me how easily big companies get pulled into licensing nightmares because their execs get bullshitted into believing a sales pitch at a seminar. Anyone who has worked with Oracle's product lineup instinctively knows what I'm talking about.
Anyone larger like that automatically also can afford the staff to simply address any shortcomings in-house and then own it forever, and perfectly tailored, and perfectly customizable at any time forever. There is no missing feature that a few hours or days of developer time doesn't erase.
Oh it's crude on day one? So what? You're still operating and on your own terms, and every week a few more minutes of work gets added as little pain points get addressed by whoever cares, and before you know it it's better than anything you can buy, and the total cost was less than your previous licensing, and you never had to deal with a serial number or license manager or account rep, never had to care one bit about counting cpu cores or client seats or vms or physical hosts or ips or backup copies or spinning up new dev boxes or more production without warning or any of that bs.
The bigger you are, the less you need the convenience of outsourcing, not more.
I started migrating my customers from VMware a good three years ago.
It does help that I have thirty years Linux experience compared to the paltry twenty five or so of VMware (which was RedHat plus stuff back in day)
I also have rather a lot of Hyper V exposure too and I defy you to love its iSCSI and networking, let alone that awful vTPM thingie.
It's Proxmox for me, any day. Even when I've completely knackered it I can always boot a systemrescuecd and mount and chroot the thing back to life.