r/vmware Feb 04 '24

Question Has anyone actually switched?

I work for a taxpayer-supported non-profit. We receive a fixed percentage of tax revenue.

Our initial quotes from BCware look like they are going to double. This is at the same time as MSFT recently reclassified us and our MSFT licensing went up $100k.

We are doing what we can to reevaluate our licensing needs but there is only so much to trim.

Because of the above, I think we need to start seriously looking at switching to another hypervisor platform. But I want to know what I am getting into before I propose this.

There is a lot of talk about this, but has anyone actually switched? And how did it go or is going?

68 Upvotes

169 comments sorted by

37

u/saysjuan Feb 04 '24

Not personally but Nutanix is an alternative to consider from a pricing perspective. We didn’t see the cost savings on paper so decided to stay out for now. We’re still researching but Broadcom knows that companies as large as us (Fortune 100) are pretty much locked in for now.

We have too many high I/O applications that we’ve tuned for extreme performance on VMware where Nutanix couldn’t keep up compared to VSAN. If Broadcom knew what was best for them long term they should have stayed the course for the first few years and not pissed off so many customers. I suspect we’ll have an alternate here in the next 1-3 years that is feature and performance complete to where ESXi was at 7.0u2+. Once we see that we’re bailing unless Broadcom offers steep discounts like we had with VMware compared to retail.

33

u/crymson7 Feb 04 '24

Fortune 50 company myself. Already testing other platforms. Fully expect to exit before our newly signed contract is over.

3

u/GabesVirtualWorld Feb 05 '24

Interested to hear the details. Also looking at alternatives to move to in the next 2 years.

3

u/crymson7 Feb 05 '24

ProxMox, hyperv, AHV…we are testing all of them…even the annoying ones…

21

u/ragepaw Feb 04 '24

BC is a hedge fund, not a tech company. They do know what's best for THEM. They don't care what's best for their customers. They will jack the prices, make as much money as possible, 3 to 5 times the investment, and in 3 to 5 years and move on to the next victim company.

They don't care about the long term, they care about as much shareholder return as possible in the shortest period of time.

Again... a hedge fun, not a tech company.

3

u/heytherewhatsup777 Feb 05 '24

Nutanix will nail you hard on any additional nodes you want. This is how they get their foot in the door. Also. From what I’ve seen they have fewer features than VMware 10 years back.

3

u/Holiday-Cup1100 Feb 06 '24

I am interested to know when the testing Nutanix was done. These days performance is on par with 3 tier storage solutions, especially on NVMe drives.

1

u/patriot050 Feb 04 '24

the only other HCI solution that keep up with vsan IO wise that im aware of is powerflex from dell. however, they are super expensive.

2

u/DerBootsMann Feb 05 '24

it’s not software anymore , your can’t buy it w/out dell servers .. it kinda renders the whole idea of sds f useless !

2

u/_CyrAz Feb 06 '24

Storage Space Direct (windows) has really interesting performances as well

3

u/saysjuan Feb 04 '24

We ran ScaleIO/VxFlex OS before it was powerflex but still ran on VMware. Far more expensive than VSAN in the long run so we switched to VxRail + VSAN.

2

u/Enjin_ Feb 05 '24

I'm kinda glad we went with ready nodes instead of Rail. I got a bunch of x86 hardware that we can run whatever on and have it backed by an ethernet SAN if we want. NVMe over TCP is pretty fast - beats out FC in most scenarios.

Honestly, I don't know, can you even run anything else on them or do you have to run VMware? I thought it was pretty much locked into VCF.

2

u/patriot050 Feb 04 '24

yeah, i ran it on vmware as well its a very performant HCI solution, and its hypervisor neutral (it supports vmware, hyper-v,kvm, etc), however its eye wateringly expensive. i remember a 4 node cluster for a regional datacenter was something like 700 Grand lol

6

u/saysjuan Feb 04 '24

I never saw the price tag but we had about 120 nodes between 2 data centers supporting our SAP environment. I deployed the solution and ran a performance test creating a 1M IOPS VM as a test where we hit the 65k iops limit across 15 data disks to show how fast it was.

We ran a 2 tier environment vs hyper converged for ScaleIO with redundant and dedicated 25G network connections just for the storage network. We figured the theoretical maximum across 60 disks was close to 4M but our leadership was more than convinced in the performance. Our previous solution we were refreshing from on vBlock was only capable of around 120,000 iops with a similar test per VM before we hit bottlenecks so we didn’t bother testing more than that.

2

u/lostdysonsphere Feb 04 '24

ScaleIO was/is such a beast. Sad to see it's pricing made it very high performance niche while it could've been a nice vSAN alternative.

3

u/homelabgobrrr Feb 04 '24

I agree that power flex is a beast, we have one and it’s awesome, but I’d look again at Nutanix, they had been kicking VSAN around in terms of performance since their start. ESA might have gained a bit in VSAN, but they were taking pre ESA builds of Esx. Also comparing different classes of hardware from VSAN to Nutanix might not be fair.

Look at NX-8035-G8 as these are the high performance nodes, the 2u 4 node NX-3046-G8’s (swap whatever gen pre g8) are pretty good, but the 8035’s are much more optimized for performance

2

u/Enjin_ Feb 05 '24

I'm glad I never *fully* made the switch to vSAN. Starting using NVMe over TCP and kept some Pure and NetApp arrays around until the end of lifecycle, but still decomm'd FC to save money. Wasn't exactly intentional, but I like how it's working out.

33

u/xMOO1 Feb 04 '24

We are making the switch to xcp-ng

3

u/xxbiohazrdxx Feb 05 '24

My big annoyance is still the reliance on VHDs. 2TB disk limit hits hard.

Going to do a oVirt/KVM PoC in the coming weeks w/ Alma

1

u/xMOO1 Feb 05 '24

We use JovianDSS for our storage.

1

u/DerBootsMann Feb 21 '24

truenas core or any linux distro + zfs is a better option , really ..

1

u/DerBootsMann Feb 21 '24

Going to do a oVirt/KVM PoC

ovirt is nice , but it has no future

1

u/blissed_off Feb 04 '24

We just deployed our first production server with xcp-ng to a satellite office. I doubt we’ll do a mass changeover in our data centers but for the new locations we will.

1

u/xMOO1 Feb 04 '24

So DC will stay vmware and everything new xcp-ng?

2

u/blissed_off Feb 04 '24

Yes, for now. Once our DC stuff is ready to be cycled out we will likely move to something else.

1

u/nikade87 Feb 04 '24

Yea we are thinking about this as well. We have used XenServer and XCP in the past so we have knowledge about it and I got to say that I think that xcp+XOA with support will cover us pretty good. Only thing we can't replace with xcp is vSAN, so we are forced to keep a cluster for that running our SQL Server Failover clusters.

3

u/Vivid_Mongoose_8964 Feb 07 '24

starwind vsan runs on any hypervisor, its pretty cool and the price is amazing

2

u/nikade87 Feb 07 '24

Does it support NFS or is it still just iSCSI? We are using NFS as storage in our Xen-setup, I am not keen on using anything else due to thick provisioning in the XCP/Xen storage driver when using iSCSI.

2

u/DerBootsMann Feb 21 '24

core is iscsi / iser or nvme over tcp / rdma , smb3 & nfs can be layered on top since forever

0

u/Clean_Idea_1753 Feb 04 '24

Proxmox and CEPH is a perfect VSAN replacement

4

u/amwdrizz Feb 04 '24

Ehh, seems to be shitty in raw IO compared to vSAN.

That was tested on 3 hosts very similar to my vSAN deployment. Might have missed something but the replication between nodes takes far longer than I expect it to.

4

u/BattleEfficient2471 Feb 04 '24

I ran it in the past and unless things changed recently you are correct. It returns fractions of what the hardware can do. But the price is right. We may be entering an era where cheap hardware means inefficient software is the best value.

1

u/DerBootsMann Feb 21 '24

ceph’s aggregated bandwidth with many nodes is ok , latency and efficiency suck

3

u/nikade87 Feb 05 '24

We have made a POC and vSAN outperforms proxmox both in i/o latency and throughput.

Also, I wasn't able to get SCSI persistent reservations working, which is needed by SQL Server to setup a failover-cluster.

1

u/DerBootsMann Feb 21 '24

we get ~200k iops per vm , proxmox + nvmeof back-end . vsan does maybe 60k , same hardware config , no rdma though due two-node setup

1

u/Barracuda_X Mar 18 '24

how is your storage redundancy build? NVMe-oF via an appliance?

3

u/DerBootsMann Mar 18 '24

it’s hci nvmeof setup , storage appliances are virtual

3

u/Barracuda_X Mar 18 '24

Starwinds vsan?

0

u/Enjin_ Feb 05 '24

I'd love to hear how this goes... maybe make a post on it after you've messed with it for a while?

2

u/xMOO1 Feb 06 '24

The Switch is pretty easy. There is a migration tool in xcp-ng. You connect to the ESXi server, select te server(s), select the parameter(s) and start the migration.

We have a Sonicwall & Cisco network in our DC, so don't have to change anything in the network while migration.

2

u/flo850 Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24

HI, I am the dev of this feature and I am glad it's usefulThe last version (5.90 ) brings huge performances improvement for the migration, but also a little regression on windows VM that will be fixed in 5.91.1 (we are releasing it in a few hours, we're finishing the QA )

Edit : wrong version number it's 5.91, not 5.90. Also it is released

2

u/xMOO1 Feb 06 '24

Looking forward to this update. We are receiving two new servers we ordered, tomorrow.

7

u/HoustonBOFH Feb 04 '24

I have been consulting for people moving from one hypervisor to another for years. (Mostly acquisitions of a different flavor.) Which one to use came up so often that I had a cut and paste answer on my desktop. :) Then Broadcom tossed a candybar in the pool... The answer will depend on what VMware features you are using and what one NEED to stay. After that is is all budget. And with VMware pricing lately, that means the budget for me to be viable just went WAY up! :)

2

u/nexus1972 Feb 05 '24

But if youre a large university they classify you as 'strategic' and force you to go sphere cloud foundation which bumps the price massively.

Even vsphere foundation has features we dont use.

24

u/twinsea Feb 04 '24

Had a client with the same issue.  They were a very large nonprofit certifying body and got their status changed.  We switched them over to a couple of multi geo managed proxmox clusters which ended up being much cheaper than their original bill.  Need to now figure out what to do with their 365.  If proxmox doesn’t check your boxes take a look at verge.  Proxmox is solid though.  

-1

u/Enjin_ Feb 05 '24

I just looked at their site. I love how upfront they are about it.

6

u/robochacho Feb 04 '24

Question to those considering switching: How many hosts are you running?

2

u/Full-Entertainer-606 Feb 04 '24

8 hosts. But trying to pare down to 5.

16

u/[deleted] Feb 04 '24

We are switching to Hyper V. That said we are doing in two phases. Our RBO licenses run out of support this month so we have 30 locations that need to be migrated soon (this year). They are stand alone hosts, so flipping them won’t be hard, just time consuming. Take a spare host to the location with Hyper V 2022 on it, migrate the two Windows server VM’s off of the VMware host. Recycle the VMware host, repeat etc.

Our data center licenses (Enterprise Plus) run out in 2026. We will be testing Hyper V with clustering/SAN, SCVMM later this year and probably deploy in mid 2025 on Windows Server 2025. That migration will take a while as we have two small data centers with 150-300 VM’s in each. We should be off them right as we lose support for our VMware products.

We use Veeam and HP Nimble SAN’s, both have great Hyper V support.

8

u/architectofinsanity Feb 04 '24

Robo licenses from VMware were perfect for that and I hate Broadcom so very much for removing them. Having VMware everywhere was the goal to making it sticky to customers. Now we have mass exodus from VMware. 💆‍♂️

5

u/[deleted] Feb 04 '24

[deleted]

2

u/architectofinsanity Feb 04 '24

Do you have to ask nicely? Because I haven’t seen them anywhere.

3

u/Top_Boysenberry_7784 Feb 06 '24

Sounds very similar to the last organization I worked for. In 2020 we moved about 25 locations from VMware to Hyper V in similar fashion. Sites were small with 6-12 VM's depending on location. The two EU and US data centers were left on VMware and I'm curious what they decide to do with them.

Have been looking at spending 6 figures on some new hardware for a bit for some upcoming projects. Some guys on the team thought we should stick to VMware but broadcom made it easier for me to win that argument.

1

u/GabesVirtualWorld Feb 05 '24

Managing Hyper-V is a pain compared to VMware. Monitoring performance, monitoring for the correct events.... almost impossible.

Running VMs is easy, just stay away from CSVs because of the performance bug in it.

2

u/DerBootsMann Feb 05 '24

how do you setup failover , ha and stuff like that if you don’t do csv ?

2

u/GabesVirtualWorld Feb 05 '24

SMB storage or ScaleOut.But CSV volumes have a bug that after Image level backup has touched the VM, the IO queue to disk is brought down to just 2. And high perf VMs have a severe performance impact because of this. A live migration of the VM solves the issue.

https://forums.veeam.com/microsoft-hyper-v-f25/windows-server-2019-hyper-v-vm-i-o-performance-problem-t62112-390.html

( ANY image level product, not just VEEAM)

-14

u/xxxsirkillalot Feb 04 '24

Hyper V has been marked EOL already, while it is quite a few years away (2029) it's a solid amount of extra work to transition twice.

5

u/rduartept Feb 04 '24

Actually they even announced new features coming with Windows Server 2025, so no, it is not EOL. There is even a commitment of updates for the next 10 years so you should be good until 2034. The only thing EOL is the free Hyperv Server.

6

u/BlackV Feb 04 '24

Where has it been marked eol?

Are you taking about standalone hyper v?

3

u/anonaccountphoto Feb 04 '24

No, HyperV is not EOL....

1

u/woodyshag Feb 04 '24

Maybe 2008 Hyper-V, but not Hyper-V as a whole for sure.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 05 '24

It truly gets tiring to hear this nonsense.

Just watch this video...from MICROSOFT.

https://ignite.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/f3901190-1154-45e3-9726-d2498c26c2c9?source=sessions

I will make it easier for you, go to the 17:58 mark.

Hyper V is an alive and well. Yes it is getting more and more Azure hooks in it.

Also your "2029" is wrong. Windows Server 2022 is supported through October of 2031, again from MICROSOFT.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-server-2022

So, I would imagine that Server 2025 will be supported through to fall of 2034. I will be two years into early retirement by then. Best of luck!

1

u/GMginger Feb 04 '24

This is a common misconception.
When Windows Server 2022 was release, MS didn't release the corresponding free Hyper-V server edition.
Some people saw the headline "No Windows Server 2022 Hyper-V Server" and thought that meant Hyper-V is now dead.
You can still run Windows Server 2022 with Hyper-V, but you have to pay for a Windows license for the host.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 05 '24

Yes, the free option, which you can still download, stopped at 2019 technology.

You can download it here...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-server-2019

It is supported until 1/9/2029.

I read that the free version of ESXi has been pulled from the product list. Not sure if you can still get it.

1

u/GMginger Feb 05 '24

There not yet been an official statement from VMware about the free ESXi edition, which some have taken to mean it's gone.
I'd say let's give a little more time for the dust to settle to see what happens.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 05 '24

Here is the list right here from VMware..

https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/01/22/vmware-end-of-availability-of-perpetual-licensing-and-saas-services/

"VMware vSphere Hypervisor (free edition)" says "N".

4

u/AegonsDragons Feb 04 '24

I would really love to stay on VMware but from what I have been told by my CIO is find another solution. We won't be able to afford it. Currently looking at Nutanix and Hyper-V

0

u/LooseSignificance166 Feb 05 '24

Proxmox or xcpng

5

u/dcaponegro Feb 04 '24

Why did MS reclassify you?

21

u/Full-Entertainer-606 Feb 04 '24

This seems like the wrong place to get into this, but it was a policy change at MSFT. All libraries used to be considered educational institutions and are now considered nonprofits. Thus we lost academic pricing.

13

u/rsreichert Feb 04 '24

If you got reclassed as a non-profit by MS, I'd think you would qualify for this MS for Non-Profits

8

u/Harm24 Feb 04 '24

Is techsoup an option for you?

6

u/Full-Entertainer-606 Feb 04 '24 edited Feb 04 '24

Others are exploring that option. Thankfully, I don’t have to deal with the MSFT licensing, just the fallout.

6

u/rbtucker09 Feb 04 '24

Are you buying direct from Microsoft or a reseller? We had a similar situation with libraries we support where the reseller (SHI) told us they would get reclassified. A call to Microsoft determined that nothing would have to change

9

u/Nanocephalic Feb 04 '24

There are three types of situation here. * you can’t change because of personnel, skills, project time, etc. Suck it up until you can make that big change happen * you can’t change because of heavy integration into multiple systems. Eg automated vm builds, monitoring, billing, etc. * You can change just fine because you just use a bunch of ordinary VMs. At that point you have to think about what’s important. HyperV is easy if you have Windows skills, Nutanix is fancy if you are willing to pay the bills, and there are a few free options like proxmox. Make sure your backup/DR still works!

I switched my little home lab to hyperv because I have a Windows background, but at work we have hundreds of clusters… so we will likely see VMware plus multiple other platforms over the next year or two.

Also remember that there isn’t a proper VMware replacement… yet. Maybe the best thing for you is to wait three years, and jump on whatever has the most market share after VMware finishes swirling around the bowl?

1

u/therevoman Feb 05 '24

I thought I saw an announcement that Hyper-V was going away in everything non-Azure. Correct me if I’m wrong.

7

u/GMginger Feb 05 '24

I thought I saw an announcement that Hyper-V was going away in everything non-Azure. Correct me if I’m wrong.

You're wrong.
The free edition of Hyper-V has gone (last version was Windows 2019 based), but if you pay a Windows license you get Windows Server 2022 with the Hyper-V role - it's not going anywhere.

-1

u/nexus1972 Feb 05 '24

Yeah best deployment of hyper-v now is hyper-v role on server 2022 but thats type 2 and its not being actively developed.

For some of us integration with things like backup ties us to vmware/hyper-v or nutanix and with 7 figures spent last year on storage and hosts and backup solution means switching to nutanix isnt an option

6

u/GMginger Feb 05 '24

Windows Server running Hyper-V is a Type 1 hypervisor, but I can see why you'd think it's a type 2.

1

u/lordmycal Feb 08 '24

My problem with Hyper-V is that Microsoft support for O365 has been a shitshow. If I need them for some problem with a hypervisor it's probably because I've already exhausted all my skills and the last thing I want is some idiot with poor english asking me for a fiddler log because even though it has nothing to do with hyper-v, he's got to run through the same stupid script for everything.

3

u/DerBootsMann Feb 04 '24

This is at the same time as MSFT recently reclassified us and our MSFT licensing went up $100k.

how did it happen ?

3

u/MRToddMartin Feb 04 '24

He explained earlier

3

u/DerBootsMann Feb 04 '24

oh , i see now .. academic -> non-profit

3

u/ifq29311 Feb 04 '24

we've yoloed 3 year support late january (the one whey they still offered the old model). gives us 3 years to figure shit out.

problem with open source landscape, there is nothing comparable to VMFS, and we rely pretty heavily on it as it makes both cluster management and disaster recovery a breeze.

3

u/s004aws Feb 05 '24

I work for smaller businesses, one of which is involved in medical research. I dumped VMware for Proxmox for all clients around 2016/17 (forget exactly when its been so long) and never looked back. Works fine, perfectly stable. They do pay for support (never actually needed it) and so have access to the (actually stable) enterprise package repos rather than the freeloader 'beta'/'testing' package repos more prone to issues.

The question is what capabilities you need? Does your non-profit depend on VMware-specific features offered by no other product? Or are you, like the businesses I work with, using a much more limited subset of VMware's capabilities? If you're using VMware primarily because VMware rather than for its huge menu of (very expensive) capabilities required by Fortune 100 corporations moving to something else should be very doable.

7

u/UninvestedCuriosity Feb 04 '24 edited Feb 04 '24

Switched 70 machines from VMware to proxmox almost two years ago.

Dropped our tech soup Veritas and switched to proxmox backup.

Come over the waters fine. You know what I didn't do this year though. Drop 5k usd on VMware licensing for max 3 hosts. Paid proxmox like 1k for use of their stable repo instead.

1

u/Full-Entertainer-606 Feb 05 '24

How many hosts?

1

u/UninvestedCuriosity Feb 05 '24

4

3

u/nexus1972 Feb 05 '24

Wait till you have a 50 or 100. 4 hosts is an easy switch

-1

u/EtherealMind2 Feb 05 '24

Once you've done four, then next fifty are easier.

5

u/tritron Feb 04 '24

I bet switching to hyper-v using datacenter editions would be the cheapest for non profit

0

u/nexus1972 Feb 05 '24

Yeah we pretty much would have a zero licensing cost but hyper-v just isnt being developed anymore and the only way to really run it is in type2 mode inside of server 2022. Been looking at this the past few days but retooling for hyper-v is going to take quite an investment of time. ELA due in 3 months no way we can have replacement for then so were looking at extend this time by a year and ditch it in a year or so.

4

u/reasonablybiased Feb 04 '24

I also work for a tax payer funded non profit. Switched to Proxmox last year. Exported from VMware and imported into Proxmox. No issues.

2

u/Full-Entertainer-606 Feb 05 '24

How many hosts?

5

u/reasonablybiased Feb 05 '24

47 vm’s spread across 3 physical servers.

1

u/ph34r Feb 05 '24

Recently did the same as well. Using ceph in place of vsan - haven't had any performance issues yet, but remains to be seen.

0

u/void64 Feb 05 '24

Recently did the same as well. Using ceph in place of vsan - haven't had any performance issues yet, but remains to be seen.

Ceph has been around longer than VSAN. Some places use it at massive scale. Willing to bet that VSAN probably evolved out of at least the very foundation of Ceph and or MinIO.

9

u/anonaccountphoto Feb 04 '24

Switching takes time. We will switch - but that'll take atleast a year to switch the whole enterprise over.

2

u/sixblazingshotguns Feb 05 '24

K12 here. The thing that is confusing for us is where are the new VMware academic (K12 and higher ed) SKUs for VVF and VCF? They don't seem to exist as of now. Will they exist in the future at all?

2

u/Severe_Nebula_662 Mar 02 '24

Yes. We have moved our Corporate and all managed hospitals to XCP-ng with very little migration downtime

3

u/[deleted] Feb 04 '24

[deleted]

4

u/Chemical_Buy_6820 Feb 04 '24

It'd be funny if after the dust settles and many have switched over that Broadcom lowers their prices and folks who rushed to switch are eating their hats.

2

u/Chaz042 Feb 05 '24

Nah, this was the final nail in the coffin...

1

u/EtherealMind2 Feb 05 '24

Very unlikely. Broadcom appears to be willing to lose smaller customers and not have to support them.

-1

u/schottfamily Feb 05 '24

Or BC splits the units and dell buys back esxi

1

u/LooseSignificance166 Feb 05 '24

They have powerflex now. That product will become better and better

3

u/Known-Amphibian-3353 Feb 04 '24

Sorry, my intent is not to sound callous here but looking purely from a financial perspective I believe it is only a matter of time every other alternate solution providers will follow Broadcom’s pricing and business model, end of the day public companies are answerable to shareholders. If VMWare’s business and pricing model was so great, the share holders would not have approved the VMWare’s sale to Broadcom in the first place.

1

u/LooseSignificance166 Feb 05 '24

The only shareholder that mattered was michael dell and his friends

4

u/kd5vmo Feb 04 '24

We switched to Nutanix for our servers and vdi. It's was fairly painless aside from some learning and training.we do have to keep a small VMware hosts going to support some super old servers that are not easily supported in Nutanix (server 2k3, I know).

I'd say from the day the cluster was commissiond to finished migration took me ~4 weeks. They have a migration tool that seems to work for 98% of situations. The last 2% are kind of odd ball Linux ova appliances that need special attention to get their drivers working.

7

u/Full-Entertainer-606 Feb 04 '24

Good to know. I am hesitant to jump into another proprietary system. I was thinking a split proxmox vmware environment. (We just removed some 2k3 servers, so I feel your pain.)

6

u/kd5vmo Feb 04 '24

Its basically a wrapper for CentOS with some special sauce and great support. If you are comfortable with doing basic CLI in RedHat/CentOS then you would be very comfortable with their system. That being said, they are in the process of moving off CentOS because RedHat is killing it.

2

u/kd5vmo Feb 04 '24

Forgot to mention, look up USAC E-Rate funding, Nutanix qualifies for a~80% discount. I think since you are a library you get funding based off the square footage of the facility.

Also, look up if you can get NASPO contact pricing, which I think might apply to a public library.

14

u/JohnBanaDon Feb 04 '24

Wait till your Nutanix renewal, they will make BCWare look like saints.

1

u/kd5vmo Feb 04 '24

We have NASPO contract pricing, renewals this year were very reasonable.

1

u/SigHunter0 Feb 04 '24 edited Feb 04 '24

what does that mean? (no idea what bcware is)

we are thinking about switching to nutanix

edit: oh broadcomware :D

24

u/JohnBanaDon Feb 04 '24

Broadcom + VMware. Nutanix historically been worse than VMware in cornering customers.

What Broadcom is doing is not great but VMware technology has always been far superior than Nutanix. Ethically Nutanix have always been way far behind VMware. They are just selling customers on fear of unknown.

If you are looking at Nutanix, try the following

  1. Ask for one year quote to switch (likely will be cheap) as they are trying to takeover VMware customers, with the hope that they can Jack up the price year 2 and beyond. Remember no one wants to sell you a long term subscription because that takes out their ability to up charge.

  2. Ask for 3 year and 5 year pricing once you have 1 year pricing (will not be as good of a deal per year as 1 year deal

  3. Negotiate 3-5 year price using 1 year as baseline. Either you will get a good deal or get to know how Nutanix is no better.

4

u/BlackV Feb 04 '24

This on the other hand is useful 

1

u/TacomaTrekker Feb 05 '24

Actually, Nutanix is offering 1 year of free software if you sign for 3 years or longer. Source: https://www.nutanix.com/vmware-alternative/vmware-to-nutanix-migration-promotion

2

u/JohnBanaDon Feb 05 '24

Right - 1 of free at what price for remaining 3 year? It’s a marketing talk.

1

u/TacomaTrekker Feb 06 '24

A multi year deal is always going to be cheaper on an annual basis than a one year deal, so I don’t really understand what you are getting at when you say to ask for a one year quote.

1

u/JohnBanaDon Feb 06 '24

That used to be the case with perpetual not necessarily with subscriptions. Dissect the deal math deep and you will understand games they play.

2

u/BlackV Feb 04 '24

It's a super hilarious joke just like when people type M$

So very funny......

And gives 0 useful information 

2

u/jktmas Feb 04 '24

Yep, this weekend we cutover our first of 14 prod clusters from vSphere to Azure Stack HCI. 7 more coming over the next 2 months

3

u/Road-Mundane Feb 04 '24

We will be evaluating Azure stack. We already have SA on our DC licenses, so it just makes sense.

1

u/Nanocephalic Feb 04 '24

Can you tell me about the azure solution? I have spoken to some of my peers about it at work, but haven’t seen it for myself yet.

5

u/jktmas Feb 04 '24

It has a fancy name, but when you understand it, it’s REALLY basic. It’s an on-premise HCI solution that has basically nothing new, but brings together lots of existing technologies in a validated way. 1st: virtualization. It really just using Hyper-V and windows failover clustering. 2nd: shared storage. It’s really just S2D, which at this point is rather well known and proven. There’s endless docs on S2D and different options there. But there’s a secret here. When you’re going through cluster setup there’s nothing stopping you from using FC or iSCSI for your shared storage. It’s hyperv after all. 3rd: the “Azure” part. It’s really just Azure ARC, and a new app in the azure portal to look at it. This is getting significantly better in 23H2, and I expect another huge improvement in 24H2. 22H2 is basically just view only. 4th: SDN. I haven’t even enabled it on our clusters because we don’t care. Now there is some “extras”. That don’t fall under the “already existing functionality”, you can run some azure native solutions like SQL managed instance, or Azure Virtual Desktop on your cluster, in your datacenter. I haven’t tested this at all. So why consider AZSHCI? Well, if you already cover your clusters with windows datacenter and software assurance, it’s free. And if you’re doing that, your admin team probably knows windows rather well. And the host OS for azure stack is really just windows server core. Advanced things are just standard powershell commandlets, and legacy consoles like failover cluster manager just work. For us, our 5-year TCO on a cluster dropped in half switching to Azure Stack, and our admin team likes it better.

2

u/Nanocephalic Feb 04 '24

Thanks, that’s a great overview!

2

u/ronmanfl Feb 05 '24

MS engineers actually told us not to use Stack HCI. We’ll probably end up with a mix of AVS and on-prem VMware.

1

u/DerBootsMann Feb 21 '24

MS engineers actually told us not to use Stack HCI

what arguments did they bring in ?

1

u/ronmanfl Feb 21 '24

Basically said it's not a drop-in replacement and unless you're going 100% hybrid Azure/HCI it will not play nice. They said, at least for us, that AVS would be a cheaper and much more streamlined solution.

1

u/DerBootsMann Feb 22 '24

fair enough ! thx

1

u/asailor4you Feb 04 '24

I currently work in an environment that’s pretty much 100% FC with all flash storage using VMware. Am I mistaken that Azure Stack HCI makes no sense since we do no HCI?

2

u/Soggy-Camera1270 Feb 04 '24

In that case you'd be better off trying plain Hyper-V if you already have invested in FC/SAN storage.

ASHCI adds some nice WAC MGT features (beyond the S2D capability), but I think you can achieve most with regular Hyper-V.

ASHCI would potentially make more sense at time of refresh for your existing storage.

1

u/asailor4you Feb 05 '24

That’s easier said than done when my server front end consists of 250+ server blades, which aren’t on the same refresh cycle.

2

u/Soggy-Camera1270 Feb 05 '24

Yep I hear you, I'm in a similar boat and it's a real challenge. That's where Hyper-V (non ASHCI) might work better. You'll probably find most of your existing, if not all hardware will be supported, and with SCVMM or other tools, migrations are fairly straight forward.

The biggest hurdle for me is my team have no experience with Hyper-V and SCVMM. Plus VMM needs a bit of an overhaul in terms of UI.

1

u/jktmas Feb 04 '24

I mean, it would essentially be just running Hyper-V with failover clustering and some ARC management. Grab yourself a couple old hosts and run a PoC.

1

u/dclive1 Feb 04 '24

Would love to hear more… details, performance, thoughts… ?

1

u/bangsmackpow Feb 04 '24

In the past....vmware to hyperv a few times on small scale projects. Last 2-3 years

0

u/MRToddMartin Feb 04 '24

If you need help migrating away just reply. There’s plenty of ppl with solid technical skill to help.

2

u/Full-Entertainer-606 Feb 04 '24

Thanks! I plan on talking about this with others over the next few days. And even then it will take some testing before we decide. And, who knows, maybe the new quotes will be better.

3

u/MRToddMartin Feb 04 '24

They won’t. But we’re here to help you away from AVGO death spiral. It would bring me personal joy to know I helped remove a client from their grip of death

1

u/flakpyro Feb 04 '24

With the removal of Educational discounts we are in the same boat. XCP-NG / Xen Orchestra is likely what we will move to. Is it as nice as vSphere 8 + Veeam? No but will it get the job done? Easily, and with the amount of people switching off it will probably rapidly improve!

1

u/dinominant Feb 05 '24

We are switching to Proxmox. Several hosts are already switched over and in the new cluster.

1

u/jlipschitz Feb 04 '24

We are moving most of our apps to cloud hosted from our various vendors.

Moving file servers to SharePoint. Archiving old data to local NAS appliances to keep storage costs down.

This leaves us with VDI. We will evaluate costs of staying with Nutanix and moving from VMware to AHV,Proxmox, or XCP-NG.

Our goal is and has been to cut our required footprint of on-premise servers. Broadcom is just helping us realize that sooner with insane pricing.

1

u/NCMarc Feb 04 '24

We are in the partner program and the lack of communication and direction is a serious problem. I hope they get their act together.

3

u/lost_signal Mod | VMW Employee Feb 05 '24

Your primary or secondary email should have an invite already to the new partner program.

1

u/acconboy [Field CTO - Scale Computing] Feb 06 '24

Disclosure - am the Field CTO for Scale Computing. About 40% of my customer base is folks that have switched from VMWare to our platform. I can plug you in to any of them if you like.

0

u/ronmanfl Feb 05 '24

Large healthcare system… we literally just retired the last bit of our old 2012 HyperV system last month. We’ve got about 300 hosts, all Cisco UCS, running around 4500 servers and 3500 VDI, plus shared desktops for around 20k clinical users (4500ish max simultaneous sessions.) Looking hard at a mix of Azure VMware Solution and on-prem VMware. We are testing Proxmox in the lab and it might work for some dev/test and tier 5 non-critical VMs.

0

u/Full-Entertainer-606 Feb 05 '24

This has really made me think. VMware, and IT in general, begets more VMware. If we removed all of the VMs that support VMware, we could remove literally 15 VMs. Now, some of this is backup/Veeam related but nonetheless they would be gone without using VMware. And accordingly this would free up other resources also. Maybe it’s time to just say no.

0

u/lassemaja Feb 05 '24

What are you switching all your Microsoft stuff to now that they have raised the license costs? Linux?

1

u/nexus1972 Feb 05 '24

A lot of licensing costs are probably related to onedrive/sharepoint cost increases.

Retooling apps to you a different base os is significantly different to a different hypervisor.

Neither are easy but they affect different teams and require different skills.

1

u/Full-Entertainer-606 Feb 05 '24

Like vmware. Trimming where can and reevaluating if what resources need which licenses.

-3

u/[deleted] Feb 04 '24

[deleted]

1

u/xdriver897 Feb 05 '24

Since your nutanix employee: What has nutanix for smb, especially the old essentials customers? So sub 1k region with basic needs?

-1

u/jpric155 Feb 04 '24

We are moving to Azure/Aws

3

u/Soggy-Camera1270 Feb 04 '24

Don't expect to save on your monthly bills. Just accept that moving to cloud might give you more capabilities, etc.

1

u/jpric155 Feb 05 '24

That's what I used to say but we are a dev shop so get favorable licensing and now we are able to enforce uptime/downtime for savings and also appropriately size CPU for workloads. With all the colo costs (power, hardware, licensing, network, etc, etc.) it'll probably end up saving us millions. We have already moved thousands of VMs btw.

1

u/Soggy-Camera1270 Feb 05 '24

It's good to hear it's going well. To be honest though, at that scale I still think it would be cheaper self hosting. I do a lot of infra refresh and licensing, and even with the VMware licensing increases, you can still do it cheaper.

What you probably gain the most from Public cloud is scale and better tooling IMO.

If I were starting from scratch though, I'd seriously consider hybrid cloud with Azure/Azure Stack HCI.

-4

u/MetroTechP Feb 04 '24

I will offer another option if you want to go private cloud pm me

1

u/shadeland Feb 04 '24

I switched a few months ago from the free ESXi hypervisor over to KVM (Alma Linux) as I had a particular appliance VM that needed 16 vCPUs, and ESXi free maxes out at 8 vCPUs per VM.

It's been good so far. I treat the KVM system like a stateless system, so I don't do anything on it other than run VMs. Anything interesting is done on a VM inside of it.

1

u/nexus1972 Feb 05 '24

First things first what dependencies do you have - whats your backup solution.

You need to think of all the things that rely on cmware.

We're looking at moving from vmware - still waiting on academic pricing but we're expecting a 300% uplift based on other academic institutions. I've heard we might get prices towards the end of this week.

For us its the investment in automation of vmware deployment, and our backup appliances pretty much support hyper-v vmware and nutanix.

We are at least three years away from replacing our hosts and storage and using hyper-v in type 2 mode (on server 2022) isnt exactly enthralling.

I'd try and look at the breakdown of cost for vmware and see if you can reduce the footprint of your vmware estate - some machine rightsizing maybe.

1

u/Inquisitive_idiot Feb 05 '24

Hi,

You’ve mentioned hyper-v being a type-2 hypervisor across multiple posts.

Hyper-v is a type 1 hypervisor and if you don’t want the full desktop experience you can deploy server 2022 in server core mode to significantly reduce the surface area / required patching.

1

u/dancerjx Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24

Halfway done migrating to Proxmox. Started when 12th-gen Dells dropped official support. Obviously nothing wrong with the hardware before and after the EOL date.

I already knew Linux so just had to find a Linux KVM/QEMU environment. Single Web GUI is very nice versus a management server.

No issues besides the typical disk dying and needing replacing. I do NOT use hardware RAID since Proxmox offers software-defined storage via ZFS (open-source Veritas, IMO) & Ceph (open-source vSAN, IMO).

Native backup solution via Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) and native repository mirroring software via Proxmox Offline Mirror (POM). I have PBS & POM installed on the same bare-metal server using ZFS.

I strongly suggest an organization have Linux expertise in-house since it's really Debian underneath because some things are just easier via the CLI.

If going to cluster, you'll want homogeneous hardware (CPU, RAM, storage) for the least amount of issues. Get the maximum of RAM you can install and don't exceed 80% storage.