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!
Proxmox works well for me
If you're running mostly Linux vms proxmix us really good. It's based on kvm and has a really nice feature set.
I've used Hyper-V and in fact moved away from ESXi long ago. VMWare had amazing features but we could not justify the ever-increasing costs. Hyper-V can do just about anything VMWare can do if you know Powershell.
Qemu/virt manager. I've been using it and it's so fast. I still need to get the clipboard sharing working but as of right now it's the best hypervisor I've ever used.
I'm pretty happy with XCP-ng with their XenOrchestra management interface. XenOrchestra has a free and enterprise version, but you can also compile it from source to get all the enterprise features. I'd recommend this script: https://github.com/ronivay/XenOrchestraInstallerUpdater
I'd say it's a slightly more advanced ESXi with vCenter and less confusing UI than Proxmox.
I actually moved everything to docker containers at home... Not an apples to apples, but I don't need so many full OSs it turns out.
At work we have a mix of things running right now to see. I don't think we'll land on ovirt or openstack. It seems like we'll bite the cost bullet and move all the important services to amazon.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| ESXi | VMWare virtual machine hypervisor |
| HA | Home Assistant automation software |
| ~ | High Availability |
| LTS | Long Term Support software version |
| LXC | Linux Containers |
| ZFS | Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity |
| k8s | Kubernetes container management package |
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OOTL and someone who only uses a vm once every several years for shits & grins: What happened to vmware?
I know everyone says to use Proxmox, but it's worth considering xcp-ng as well.
I do do not not know— however, that logo is amazing
EDIT: Found it — https://sega-ai.neocities.org/
If you are dipping toes into containers with kvm and proxmox already, then perhaps you could jump into the deep end and look at kubernetes (k8s).
Even though you say you don't need production quality. It actually does a lot for you and you just need to learn a single API framework which has really great documentation.
Personally, if I am choosing a new service to host. One of my first metrics in that decision is how well is it documented.
You could also go the simple route and use docker to make containers. However making your own containers is optional as most services have pre built ones that you can use.
You could even use auto scaling to run your cluster with just 1 node if you don't need it to be highly available with a lot of 9s in uptime.
The trickiest thing with K8s is the networking, certs and DNS but there are services you can host to take care of that for you. I use istio for networking, cert-manager for certs and external-dns for DNS.
I would recommend trying out k8s first on a cloud provider like digital ocean or linode. Managing your own k8s control plane on bare metal has its own complications.
For home have a crack at KVM with front ends like proxmox or canonical lxd manager.
In an enterprise environment take a look at Hyper-V or if you think you need hyper converged look at Nutanix.
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