4 ms·

While I am excited to see that quite a decent number of past clients I've had are considering proxmox and other virtualization stacks, I am not confident there

by csydas 3y ago

While I am excited to see that quite a decent number of past clients I've had are considering proxmox and other virtualization stacks, I am not confident there will be a fast answer for this new change in the virtualization realm. Large and Enterprise companies won't really be bothered by the change except the price, and unless other platforms include all the "Enterprise Check-boxes" they think they want, I'm not sure how fast adoption will be if at all for stacks like Proxmox. I am not defending the business model or the tech offerings of Vmware, Microsoft, etc -- far from it. They're extremely bloated, buggy, and unless you happen to be one of VMware or Microsoft's most expensive customers, the support might as well just be a sin tax. Even for the "biggest" clients, they were not able to get Vmware or Microsoft to budge on some pretty obvious and complete blocker bugs that would drop production environments entirely. Enterprise is weird -- I would be extremely happy if not a bit exhausted supporting a large OSS virtualization infrastructure for clients, but I just do not see it happening without a lot of "carrots" for such companies from the virtualization vendor. Enterprise business is basically about shifting responsibility and liability for your tech-stack to someone else -- yes, it requires strong tech skills to use these tech-stacks, but the more maintenance/liability that can be shifted to the vendor, the more preferable it is for most companies. I don't know what the businesses will choose -- I'm hopeful medium and smaller businesses will shift to more open solutions and from this business, the open solutions will be able to grow and become more attractive choices for enterprise, I'm just not sure that such solutions will avoid the tech industry's obsession with subscription licensing and feature bloat to check boxes.

depereo 3y ago
With all the 'investment' in ISO27001:* validation of the existing infrastructure choices and the like, I'd be astonished if any move in a large company was able to happen within five years. From what I've seen none of them have taken this issue seriously, either, and won't until they get squeezed hard enough, at which point they'll have to... spend five years trying to move!
phpisthebest 3y ago
We would have to see a 2x minimum YoY cost increase just to justify a poliot program to consider moving to something else Keep in mind it is more than just shifting all of the VM workloads to a new platform something not easy in the first place But you also have to factor admin training, backup and recovery systems, monitoriting systems, automation tooling, etc. We have been using vmware since version 3 or 4, our entire team is almost exclusively training on vmware, with limited knowledge on hyperv and virtually none on anything else Something like ProxMox that has no third party support, no veeam support, limited automation tooling, limited support for commerical monitoring (like PRTG) etc etc is probally a non-starter unless those things support it. It would cost us far far far far more than 3x licensing increases to git rid vmware. Broadcom knows this. Honestly VMWare has not been increasing its prices as aggressievly as other vendors anyway, of my software licensing fees I pay annually vmware is one of the cheaper vendors I have, not even breaking into the top 10, I pay more for Veeam, Windows Server, and many many many other things than i do vmware
- tlamponi 3y ago
  > Something like ProxMox that has no third party support, no veeam support, limited automation tooling, limited support for commerical monitoring (like PRTG) etc etc is probally a non-starter unless those things support it. Proxmox VE has an extensive REST API with API tokens and an access control system to allow for safe automation. There are also Terraform providers and Ansible modules for those that do not want to use the API directly, or use those automation tools already. There's also Proxmox Backup Server that can handle guest-level backups as good as Veeam can, but yes, the agents and application level backups is still not there, but most of those are unrelated to the outer hypervisor, so one can still use their preferred backup solution for those parts just fine. Central monitoring is possible through the external metric server integration. Further third-party integration is a natural chicken-and-egg issue. For a lot of third party integrations you might just need to ask the vendor of said third party if they can support Proxmox VE, as long as they receive no inquiries as admins won't even ask if it would be possible, they have no incentive to add support for anything. But it's getting better, and more eggs are hatching. > It would cost us far far far far more than 3x licensing increases to git rid vmware. Broadcom knows this. The migrations I saw in our enterprise support had way lower cost. IMO 3x the cost would need some heavily specialized workload (which IME fewer admins actually really have than they might think) and/or admins that are just heavily against any change (as yes, they must relearn how to do some things, there are training courses for a few thousand bucks that cover the whole stack though) or having an anti-FOSS/Linux'ish mindset. I.e., come to us with so many prejudices that it's hard to make them realize that, while there are surely things that can improve, that just the same on the other side of the "pasture", but overall the grass is quite green enough for most use cases already.
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    >>>>Proxmox VE has an extensive REST API with API tokens I am sure it does, that would then require enterprise to build their own tooling. I clearly talked about integration with 3rd parties that were built into the product, I do not know many IT Teams that have either the human resources to devote or in many cases the Knowledge to inhouse dev their one tools on that level. They purchase 3rd party tools in lieu of bespoke tooling. This is a common point of contention when I interact with people in developer or devops communities like this one, they have forgotten how traditional IT shops work. We are still out here, and we are most likely the primarly customers impacted by this change. The DevOps shops are in the cloud... >>>>There's also Proxmox Backup Server that can handle guest-level backups as good as Veeam can, but yes, the agents and application level backups is still not there PBS is not a replacement for veeam even for Guest-Level Backups, It is about 5 years behind if not more in Backup Tech. Veeam Provides (that ProxMox does not) * Hypervisor agnostic backups (Restore from any supported Hypervisor to Any hypervisor or supported Cloud. i.e I can restore a vmWare VM to AWS Directly) * Application Aware processing for common applications like SQL, Sharepoint, etc I think this is different than what you call "Application Level", as an Application Aware Backup will use technology to flush cache, finish tranactions, prune logs, etc to put the application in "saved" or "backup ready" state, PBS creates "Crash Consistent" backups only, basically as if you just pulled the power from the VM, some applications this will corrupt data, Application Aware backups work to prevent that corruption * SQL Transaction Logs backup in per minute intervals with cross location functionality * Continuous Replication * Isolated / Automated Restore testing with reports * Awesome Compression and Duplication rates in the backup files * Builtin Support for S3 Storage with out having to do OS Level hacks (PBS depends on something like rclone to do this) * Builtin Support for Block Replication with having to do OS Level Hacks * Help Desk portal for File Level Restores that allow for RBAC Security * Integrated Agent based backups for physical systems that provides a Single Plane of Glass for Backups * Change Block Tracking (CBT) support * Immutable backups repository Comparing PBS to Veeam, is like Comparing pfsense to Palo Alto Pan-OS firewall, sure they both block traffic, but 1 in 100x more advanced

by csydas 3y ago

depereo 3y ago

With all the 'investment' in ISO27001:* validation of the existing infrastructure choices and the like, I'd be astonished if any move in a large company was able to happen within five years. From what I've seen none of them have taken this issue seriously, either, and won't until they get squeezed hard enough, at which point they'll have to... spend five years trying to move!

phpisthebest 3y ago

We would have to see a 2x minimum YoY cost increase just to justify a poliot program to consider moving to something else Keep in mind it is more than just shifting all of the VM workloads to a new platform something not easy in the first place But you also have to factor admin training, backup and recovery systems, monitoriting systems, automation tooling, etc. We have been using vmware since version 3 or 4, our entire team is almost exclusively training on vmware, with limited knowledge on hyperv and virtually none on anything else Something like ProxMox that has no third party support, no veeam support, limited automation tooling, limited support for commerical monitoring (like PRTG) etc etc is probally a non-starter unless those things support it. It would cost us far far far far more than 3x licensing increases to git rid vmware. Broadcom knows this. Honestly VMWare has not been increasing its prices as aggressievly as other vendors anyway, of my software licensing fees I pay annually vmware is one of the cheaper vendors I have, not even breaking into the top 10, I pay more for Veeam, Windows Server, and many many many other things than i do vmware

tlamponi 3y ago
> Something like ProxMox that has no third party support, no veeam support, limited automation tooling, limited support for commerical monitoring (like PRTG) etc etc is probally a non-starter unless those things support it. Proxmox VE has an extensive REST API with API tokens and an access control system to allow for safe automation. There are also Terraform providers and Ansible modules for those that do not want to use the API directly, or use those automation tools already. There's also Proxmox Backup Server that can handle guest-level backups as good as Veeam can, but yes, the agents and application level backups is still not there, but most of those are unrelated to the outer hypervisor, so one can still use their preferred backup solution for those parts just fine. Central monitoring is possible through the external metric server integration. Further third-party integration is a natural chicken-and-egg issue. For a lot of third party integrations you might just need to ask the vendor of said third party if they can support Proxmox VE, as long as they receive no inquiries as admins won't even ask if it would be possible, they have no incentive to add support for anything. But it's getting better, and more eggs are hatching. > It would cost us far far far far more than 3x licensing increases to git rid vmware. Broadcom knows this. The migrations I saw in our enterprise support had way lower cost. IMO 3x the cost would need some heavily specialized workload (which IME fewer admins actually really have than they might think) and/or admins that are just heavily against any change (as yes, they must relearn how to do some things, there are training courses for a few thousand bucks that cover the whole stack though) or having an anti-FOSS/Linux'ish mindset. I.e., come to us with so many prejudices that it's hard to make them realize that, while there are surely things that can improve, that just the same on the other side of the "pasture", but overall the grass is quite green enough for most use cases already.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  >>>>Proxmox VE has an extensive REST API with API tokens I am sure it does, that would then require enterprise to build their own tooling. I clearly talked about integration with 3rd parties that were built into the product, I do not know many IT Teams that have either the human resources to devote or in many cases the Knowledge to inhouse dev their one tools on that level. They purchase 3rd party tools in lieu of bespoke tooling. This is a common point of contention when I interact with people in developer or devops communities like this one, they have forgotten how traditional IT shops work. We are still out here, and we are most likely the primarly customers impacted by this change. The DevOps shops are in the cloud... >>>>There's also Proxmox Backup Server that can handle guest-level backups as good as Veeam can, but yes, the agents and application level backups is still not there PBS is not a replacement for veeam even for Guest-Level Backups, It is about 5 years behind if not more in Backup Tech. Veeam Provides (that ProxMox does not) * Hypervisor agnostic backups (Restore from any supported Hypervisor to Any hypervisor or supported Cloud. i.e I can restore a vmWare VM to AWS Directly) * Application Aware processing for common applications like SQL, Sharepoint, etc I think this is different than what you call "Application Level", as an Application Aware Backup will use technology to flush cache, finish tranactions, prune logs, etc to put the application in "saved" or "backup ready" state, PBS creates "Crash Consistent" backups only, basically as if you just pulled the power from the VM, some applications this will corrupt data, Application Aware backups work to prevent that corruption * SQL Transaction Logs backup in per minute intervals with cross location functionality * Continuous Replication * Isolated / Automated Restore testing with reports * Awesome Compression and Duplication rates in the backup files * Builtin Support for S3 Storage with out having to do OS Level hacks (PBS depends on something like rclone to do this) * Builtin Support for Block Replication with having to do OS Level Hacks * Help Desk portal for File Level Restores that allow for RBAC Security * Integrated Agent based backups for physical systems that provides a Single Plane of Glass for Backups * Change Block Tracking (CBT) support * Immutable backups repository Comparing PBS to Veeam, is like Comparing pfsense to Palo Alto Pan-OS firewall, sure they both block traffic, but 1 in 100x more advanced