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Now that vmware is over, what should I move to? (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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With free esxi over, not shocking bit sad, I am now about to move away from a virtualisation platform i’ve used for a quarter of a century.

Never having really tried the alternatives, is there anything that looks and feels like esxi out there?

I don’t have anything exceptional I host, I don’t need production quality for myself but in all seriousness what we run at home end up at work at some point so there’s that aspect too.

Thanks for your input!

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[–] 5 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Ooh, didn't know libvirt supported clusters and live migrations...

I've just setup Proxmox, but as it's Debian based and I run Arch everywhere else, then maybe I could try that... thanks!

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

    In my experience and for my mostly basic needs, major differences between libvirt and proxmox:

    • The "clustering" in libvirt is very limited (no HA, automatic fencing, ceph inegration, etc. at least out-of-the box), I basically use it to 1. admin multiple libvirt hypervisors from a single libvirt/virt-manager instance 2. migrate VMs between instances (they need to be using shared storage for disks, etc), but it covers 90% of my use cases.
    • On proxmox hosts I let proxmox manage the firewall, on libvirt hosts I manage it through firewalld like any other server (+ libvirt/qemu hooks for port forwarding).
    • On proxmox I use the built-in template feature to provision new VMs from a template, on libvirt I do a mix of virt-clone and virt-sysprep.
    • On libvirt I use virt-install and a Debian preseed.cfg to provision new templates, on proxmox I do it... well... manually. But both support cloud-init based provisioning so I might standardize to that in the future (and ditch templates)
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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    LXD/Incus provides a management and automation layer that really makes things work smoothly essentially replacing Proxmox. With Incus you can create clusters, download, manage and create OS images, run backups and restores, bootstrap things with cloud-init, move containers and VMs between servers (even live sometimes) and those are just a few things you can do with it and not with pure KVM/libvirt. Also has a WebUI for those interested.

    A big advantage of LXD is the fact that it provides a unified experience to deal with both containers and VMs, no need to learn two different tools / APIs as the same commands and options will be used to manage both. Even profiles defining storage, network resources and other policies can be shared and applied across both containers and VMs.

    Incus isn’t about replacing existing virtualization techniques such as QEMU, KVM and libvirt, it is about augmenting them so they become easier to manage at scale and overall more efficient. It plays on the land of, let’s say, Proxmox and I can guarantee you that most people running it today will eventually move to Incus and never look back. It woks way better, true open-source, no bugs, no holding back critical fixes for paying users and way less overhead.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    they need to be using shared storage for disks

    You can perform a live migration without shared storage with libvirt

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    I should RTFM again... https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/libvirt-clients/virsh.1.en.html has options for virsh migrate such as --copy-storage-all... Not sure how it would work for actual live migrations but I will definitely check it out. Thanks for the hint

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Pretty darn well. I actually needed to do some maintenance on the server earlier today so I just migrated all of the VMs over to my desktop, did the server maintenance, and then moved the VMs back over to the server, all while live and functioning. Running ping in the background looks like it missed a handful of pings as the switches figured their life out and then was right back where they were; not even long enough for uptime-kuma to notice.

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