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I got my current job because I could lead the hyper-v to VMware migration project. Just this year I led the VMware to hyper-v migration project. VMware was such

by ramgine 25d ago

I got my current job because I could lead the hyper-v to VMware migration project. Just this year I led the VMware to hyper-v migration project. VMware was such a great product (although a bit cumbersome in the VCF environment I managed). It’s really unfortunate it went the way of Broadcom. In comparison Hyper-v feels like a typical Microsoft product. A bunch of different tools created by different teams to do tasks that feel bolted on and afterthoughts. I have to run FCM to manage the nodes? But I run HVM to manage the roles? But there’s no overall resource management like VMware vsphere or proxmox does natively? I’ve quietly built a proxmox cluster in our environment for semi-prod workloads for when the inevitable windows host has issues.

sigmoid10 25d ago
I actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows over the years that once I tried out hyper-v for the first time last year, I somehow have never touched vmware again. Sure vmware has better configs, cleaner interface and some very subtle design advantages. But damn, hyper-v just fucking works and it keeps working across updates. I have a VM that has been running for a year and it is still perfectly doing exactly what it should. I never experienced that with vmware.
- simoncion 25d ago
  > I actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows... I assume this means that you were using Vmware Workstation? The VDDK is for Vmware vSphere, which -IIRC- runs on Linux and coordinates computers running ESXi, which are where vSphere VMs actually run. Not that many people are going to be using Vmware Workstation to run a large number of VMs.
  - protocolture 25d ago
    I remember reading some obscure customer doco that "The old fax server is running on the virtual host" And I was like... what virtual host? What I found was Server 2003 running on VMWare Workstation, running on a Windows 7 Dell PC sitting at the bottom of a rack. A lot of people think VMWare Workstation is the pinnacle product of the company and I have NFI how this came to be.
    - whizzter 25d ago
      I think you're conflating different requirements/usecases. Sure, a type-1 hypervisor like vSphere is technically better since there's no host OS creating unmanageable contention and if you have guests with higher performance requirements then yeah it's settling for something half-assed. But in reality, we have some similar shit to a "fax server" that has manually set up weird manufacturer printer settings (local admins tried to be automated/distributed) and old third-party software libraries that "infects" a system globally (2 versions of that library cannot co-exist on a computer). If that piece of crap can be contained on a VM, as long as it's contained and keeps trucking after a restart/powercycle everyone is happy. What kind of VM container hosts it is really secondary. (What the software in question is can probably be inferred from the comment, the software is liked by users at the client so it's not going away)
      - simoncion 23d ago
        > I think you're conflating different requirements/usecases. I disagree. protoculture's core statement seems to be: A lot of people think VMWare Workstation is the pinnacle product of the company and I have NFI how this came to be. A company's pinnacle product can be completely useless to me, but that doesn't change the fact that the products of theirs that I do use are very simple and unimpressive when compared to it. [0] Having said that, I expect that a lot of people think Vmware Workstation is Vmware's pinnacle product because they've never heard of vSphere, ESXi, or anything else the company has made. "People have no knowledge of like 95% of what most companies do." is always a solid first guess when trying to work out confusion like protoculture's. [0] Please spare me the "But how can it be a pinnacle product if it's not useful to you?" retort and ones like it. I've deliberately made a distinction between a product's usefulness to me personally and the sophistication of that product.
        whizzter 23d ago
        I don't think we're particularly in disagreement here, I think pinnacle product in manys eyes can be both reputational(prob workstation) or economic in addition to technical, so my reply was mostly in terms of replying to the NFI part of that statement and not really in terms of any personal judgement.
tstrimple 25d ago
I've lead roughly $20M in cloud migration projects in the last two years away from vmware to cloud services as replacements. Just insane what MBAs are willing to do to a product to squeeze short term profits. Even more insane that this country largely sees these people as a benefit to society and not the vultures they are.
- broknbottle 25d ago
  The cloud see them as a benefit, that’s for sure. They are frothing at the mouth for the customers to migrate their workloads.
- BLKNSLVR 25d ago
  When the country is run by vultures, they celebrate the discovery of new successful ways to vult.
- aleph_minus_one 25d ago
  > Just insane what MBAs are willing to do to a product to squeeze short term profits. Even more insane that this country largely sees these people as a benefit to society and not the vultures they are. I do understand the argument that it can be considered as a benefit for society if companies that have a very incompetent management that falls for this kind of trap of getting locked in by some vendor without having an emergency escape plan available get milked or even get bust. :-)
  - bornfreddy 25d ago
    Well, it's not actually a trap, since it's not the management who pays the price - it is investors, employees and the society at large that do, while the MBAs have already moved on to their next victim. Problem with incentives, I would say.
- ramgine 25d ago
  The magic that is opex compared to capex. I'm sure it makes sense to some bean counter somewhere in the company, but for us who manage the resources it's always a loss.
kev009 25d ago
Corporate IT is kind of a parallel universe to me, so it is interesting to see how widely used these products are and how impactful these types of events are. There are a few broad categories to building one of these platforms.. core virtualization ("relatively easy"), device model ("medium hard"), storage management ("hard"), management plane ("medium hard"). VMWare popularized x86 core virtualization and defined their own device model because they were the early market leader. But the device model is pretty bizarre and I haven't been particularly impressed by the guest driver quality over the years. VMFS and vSAN seem good for storage, the latter being better than anything open source. Management plane was mediocre, I remember it took a while to move off Flash and fat clients while cloud vendors were showing none of that was necessary from inception, and everything is kind of in a walled garden by design (embedded DB etc).
- ExoticPearTree 25d ago
  I had a lot of positive experiences with VMware (ESXi + vCenter). Every time I had a new project, I tried to keep it as simple as possible and it worked wonderfully. SAN, Distributed Switches, Automatic VM migrations to balance CPU usage etc. VSAN was a weird one until I understood the logic behind it, but the licensing costs kind of brought on-par to buying a SAN and be happy. I haven't touched Microsoft Hyper-V.
manjose2018 25d ago
Does your company have a ton of thick-client apps? I feel like so many workloads are on the web right now and thick clients are slowly becoming a thing of the past - but maybe in Enterprise there are still stubborn thick client Win32 apps that are mission critical. If I were starting a company today I would make sure that the majority of my apps were web based. (CRM[netsuite or sf.com], O365/GoogleDocs, workday|gusto, etc.)
- d3Xt3r 25d ago
  Most high-security environments (banks, govt agencies etc) have a large on-prem footprint. Then there's specialised industries like manufacturing, science and engineering who typically have a bunch of embedded systems, often running ancient versions of Windows or something that needs to talk to a local ancient server. And many old companies have tons of legacy apps which are a PITA to migrate to newer infrastructure. So yeah, plenty of folks out there using omprem gear, it's kinda the reason why Broadcom is able to what it's doing - lots of suckers out there who're married yo vmware and can't get a divorce.
  - JoeBOFH 25d ago
    Reminds me of setting up VMware Workstation with USB ISA cards to keep a line running. Ugh
    - deltoidmaximus 25d ago
      I'd love to hear more about that. I didn't think Workstation could do anything besides USB device passthrough!
      - JoeBOFH 24d ago
        I’ll be honest it’s been over 10 years at this point. But we had to virtualize a dying Gateway 2000 that had Windows XP on it. As part of that we needed ISA to keep working. I found some USB ISA adapters and ordered them. It took a lot of messing around with Workstation, the host Windows 7 and drivers on the VM. I can’t remember all the details at this point :(
Flere-Imsaho 25d ago
> quietly built a proxmox cluster Why is your place of work not moving wholesale to Proxmox? It's mad that HyperV is chosen as a solution in this day and age.
- cloudie78 25d ago
  Legal/Compliance/Risk department along the lines of “ nobody ever got fired for buying ibm”
- WokeUp420 25d ago
  Proxmox is amateur hour. No enterprise support
  - throw0101a 25d ago
    > Proxmox is amateur hour. No enterprise support 24/7 support will be available starting in October: * https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/company-details/press-releases/proxmox-24-7-support-and-proxmox-north-america https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/company-details/press-relea... The other thing perhaps worth noting that the entire stack is open source, even Proxmox's 'special sauce' for management. Depending on your organization, if you can solve a problem with Debian (and Qemu) you can solve a problem with Proxmox.
    - PunchyHamster 25d ago
      If you can solve a problem with Debian and Qemu Proxmox gives you nothing. Better to just use same automation you use for VMs to just keep fleet of bare Debian + KVM machines. Proxmox is for when you don't have a bunch of Linux experts on board. And that's also kinda what enterprises want to pay for, removing "liability" of having to keep very competent team. ...the fact that ends up costing them more everywhere is of no concern to middle management
      - throw0101a 24d ago
        > If you can solve a problem with Debian and Qemu Proxmox gives you nothing. Proxmox gives you centralized management of a fleet of clustered systems with a very handy GUI (as well as CLI and API) that's used by many thousands of installations, which is a lot better than try to cobble together something yourself IMHO. Just because you have "a bunch of Linux experts on board" doesn't mean they have to 'waste' their time on re-inventing the wheel for management of VMs. At my last job we had plenty of Linux folks and primarily ran a whole bunch of OpenStack, but we still used Proxmox for standalone management of VMs for 'tier zero' services (e.g., DNS, SMTP, LDAP, NTP) of various sorts that OpenStack itself depended on.
yardie 25d ago
> I have to run FCM to manage the nodes? But I run HVM to manage the roles? But there’s no overall resource management like VMware vsphere or proxmox does natively? Microsoft hides their best stuff in SCVMM, which is another product and another license they want you to purchase. Anytime I've asked someone from MS why I can't X like I can in vCenter the response was usually, "oh, it's in System Center. FCM, HVM are just stripped down. If you need it you should buy System Center."
- tbyehl 25d ago
  SCVMM may technically have the thing you're missing from vCenter... but it's no vCenter. It is a grotesque, MMC plug-in-looking application where nothing quite makes sense to someone accustomed to vCenter or Hyper-V / FCM. Maybe if you're into Azure and slap another layer on top w/ Arc you'll have something that... is less icky but still isn't vCenter. But, hey, The Reg says that VMware is now claiming that vSphere Standard was never really cancelled. https://www.theregister.com/virtualization/2026/09/02/vmware-swings-its-focus-back-to-low-end-server-virt-promises-vsphere-standard-upgrade/5294083 https://www.theregister.com/virtualization/2026/09/02/vmware...
  - yardie 24d ago
    Microsoft has done a lot of shitty things, including letting Windows Server and SCVMM languish to push/force their customers to Azure. I've been to a few Ignites and the feeling I got was Server development was starving for resources while the things we've asked for were being deployed to Azure only. I don't think SCVMM is as bad as you portrait. I've used both SCVMM and vCenter. vCenter is so far ahead. And SCVMM was getting there until 2022. When they stopped trying.
    - pjmlp 24d ago
      Windows development in general, sadly, hence why I refer that Microsoft sees Azure as Azure OS. If you think about it, all hyperscalers are hardly any different from old timesharing OSes, the only big difference is the way we get to log into the platform.

by ramgine 25d ago

sigmoid10 25d ago

I actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows over the years that once I tried out hyper-v for the first time last year, I somehow have never touched vmware again. Sure vmware has better configs, cleaner interface and some very subtle design advantages. But damn, hyper-v just fucking works and it keeps working across updates. I have a VM that has been running for a year and it is still perfectly doing exactly what it should. I never experienced that with vmware.

simoncion 25d ago
> I actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows... I assume this means that you were using Vmware Workstation? The VDDK is for Vmware vSphere, which -IIRC- runs on Linux and coordinates computers running ESXi, which are where vSphere VMs actually run. Not that many people are going to be using Vmware Workstation to run a large number of VMs.
- protocolture 25d ago
  I remember reading some obscure customer doco that "The old fax server is running on the virtual host" And I was like... what virtual host? What I found was Server 2003 running on VMWare Workstation, running on a Windows 7 Dell PC sitting at the bottom of a rack. A lot of people think VMWare Workstation is the pinnacle product of the company and I have NFI how this came to be.
  - whizzter 25d ago
    I think you're conflating different requirements/usecases. Sure, a type-1 hypervisor like vSphere is technically better since there's no host OS creating unmanageable contention and if you have guests with higher performance requirements then yeah it's settling for something half-assed. But in reality, we have some similar shit to a "fax server" that has manually set up weird manufacturer printer settings (local admins tried to be automated/distributed) and old third-party software libraries that "infects" a system globally (2 versions of that library cannot co-exist on a computer). If that piece of crap can be contained on a VM, as long as it's contained and keeps trucking after a restart/powercycle everyone is happy. What kind of VM container hosts it is really secondary. (What the software in question is can probably be inferred from the comment, the software is liked by users at the client so it's not going away)
    - simoncion 23d ago
      > I think you're conflating different requirements/usecases. I disagree. protoculture's core statement seems to be: A lot of people think VMWare Workstation is the pinnacle product of the company and I have NFI how this came to be. A company's pinnacle product can be completely useless to me, but that doesn't change the fact that the products of theirs that I do use are very simple and unimpressive when compared to it. [0] Having said that, I expect that a lot of people think Vmware Workstation is Vmware's pinnacle product because they've never heard of vSphere, ESXi, or anything else the company has made. "People have no knowledge of like 95% of what most companies do." is always a solid first guess when trying to work out confusion like protoculture's. [0] Please spare me the "But how can it be a pinnacle product if it's not useful to you?" retort and ones like it. I've deliberately made a distinction between a product's usefulness to me personally and the sophistication of that product.
      - whizzter 23d ago
        I don't think we're particularly in disagreement here, I think pinnacle product in manys eyes can be both reputational(prob workstation) or economic in addition to technical, so my reply was mostly in terms of replying to the NFI part of that statement and not really in terms of any personal judgement.

tstrimple 25d ago

I've lead roughly $20M in cloud migration projects in the last two years away from vmware to cloud services as replacements. Just insane what MBAs are willing to do to a product to squeeze short term profits. Even more insane that this country largely sees these people as a benefit to society and not the vultures they are.

broknbottle 25d ago
The cloud see them as a benefit, that’s for sure. They are frothing at the mouth for the customers to migrate their workloads.
BLKNSLVR 25d ago
When the country is run by vultures, they celebrate the discovery of new successful ways to vult.
aleph_minus_one 25d ago
> Just insane what MBAs are willing to do to a product to squeeze short term profits. Even more insane that this country largely sees these people as a benefit to society and not the vultures they are. I do understand the argument that it can be considered as a benefit for society if companies that have a very incompetent management that falls for this kind of trap of getting locked in by some vendor without having an emergency escape plan available get milked or even get bust. :-)
- bornfreddy 25d ago
  Well, it's not actually a trap, since it's not the management who pays the price - it is investors, employees and the society at large that do, while the MBAs have already moved on to their next victim. Problem with incentives, I would say.
ramgine 25d ago
The magic that is opex compared to capex. I'm sure it makes sense to some bean counter somewhere in the company, but for us who manage the resources it's always a loss.

kev009 25d ago

Corporate IT is kind of a parallel universe to me, so it is interesting to see how widely used these products are and how impactful these types of events are. There are a few broad categories to building one of these platforms.. core virtualization ("relatively easy"), device model ("medium hard"), storage management ("hard"), management plane ("medium hard"). VMWare popularized x86 core virtualization and defined their own device model because they were the early market leader. But the device model is pretty bizarre and I haven't been particularly impressed by the guest driver quality over the years. VMFS and vSAN seem good for storage, the latter being better than anything open source. Management plane was mediocre, I remember it took a while to move off Flash and fat clients while cloud vendors were showing none of that was necessary from inception, and everything is kind of in a walled garden by design (embedded DB etc).

ExoticPearTree 25d ago
I had a lot of positive experiences with VMware (ESXi + vCenter). Every time I had a new project, I tried to keep it as simple as possible and it worked wonderfully. SAN, Distributed Switches, Automatic VM migrations to balance CPU usage etc. VSAN was a weird one until I understood the logic behind it, but the licensing costs kind of brought on-par to buying a SAN and be happy. I haven't touched Microsoft Hyper-V.

manjose2018 25d ago

Does your company have a ton of thick-client apps? I feel like so many workloads are on the web right now and thick clients are slowly becoming a thing of the past - but maybe in Enterprise there are still stubborn thick client Win32 apps that are mission critical. If I were starting a company today I would make sure that the majority of my apps were web based. (CRM[netsuite or sf.com], O365/GoogleDocs, workday|gusto, etc.)

d3Xt3r 25d ago
Most high-security environments (banks, govt agencies etc) have a large on-prem footprint. Then there's specialised industries like manufacturing, science and engineering who typically have a bunch of embedded systems, often running ancient versions of Windows or something that needs to talk to a local ancient server. And many old companies have tons of legacy apps which are a PITA to migrate to newer infrastructure. So yeah, plenty of folks out there using omprem gear, it's kinda the reason why Broadcom is able to what it's doing - lots of suckers out there who're married yo vmware and can't get a divorce.
- JoeBOFH 25d ago
  Reminds me of setting up VMware Workstation with USB ISA cards to keep a line running. Ugh
  - deltoidmaximus 25d ago
    I'd love to hear more about that. I didn't think Workstation could do anything besides USB device passthrough!
    - JoeBOFH 24d ago
      I’ll be honest it’s been over 10 years at this point. But we had to virtualize a dying Gateway 2000 that had Windows XP on it. As part of that we needed ISA to keep working. I found some USB ISA adapters and ordered them. It took a lot of messing around with Workstation, the host Windows 7 and drivers on the VM. I can’t remember all the details at this point :(

Flere-Imsaho 25d ago

> quietly built a proxmox cluster Why is your place of work not moving wholesale to Proxmox? It's mad that HyperV is chosen as a solution in this day and age.

cloudie78 25d ago
Legal/Compliance/Risk department along the lines of “ nobody ever got fired for buying ibm”
WokeUp420 25d ago
Proxmox is amateur hour. No enterprise support
- throw0101a 25d ago
  > Proxmox is amateur hour. No enterprise support 24/7 support will be available starting in October: * https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/company-details/press-releases/proxmox-24-7-support-and-proxmox-north-america https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/company-details/press-relea... The other thing perhaps worth noting that the entire stack is open source, even Proxmox's 'special sauce' for management. Depending on your organization, if you can solve a problem with Debian (and Qemu) you can solve a problem with Proxmox.
  - PunchyHamster 25d ago
    If you can solve a problem with Debian and Qemu Proxmox gives you nothing. Better to just use same automation you use for VMs to just keep fleet of bare Debian + KVM machines. Proxmox is for when you don't have a bunch of Linux experts on board. And that's also kinda what enterprises want to pay for, removing "liability" of having to keep very competent team. ...the fact that ends up costing them more everywhere is of no concern to middle management
    - throw0101a 24d ago
      > If you can solve a problem with Debian and Qemu Proxmox gives you nothing. Proxmox gives you centralized management of a fleet of clustered systems with a very handy GUI (as well as CLI and API) that's used by many thousands of installations, which is a lot better than try to cobble together something yourself IMHO. Just because you have "a bunch of Linux experts on board" doesn't mean they have to 'waste' their time on re-inventing the wheel for management of VMs. At my last job we had plenty of Linux folks and primarily ran a whole bunch of OpenStack, but we still used Proxmox for standalone management of VMs for 'tier zero' services (e.g., DNS, SMTP, LDAP, NTP) of various sorts that OpenStack itself depended on.

yardie 25d ago

> I have to run FCM to manage the nodes? But I run HVM to manage the roles? But there’s no overall resource management like VMware vsphere or proxmox does natively? Microsoft hides their best stuff in SCVMM, which is another product and another license they want you to purchase. Anytime I've asked someone from MS why I can't X like I can in vCenter the response was usually, "oh, it's in System Center. FCM, HVM are just stripped down. If you need it you should buy System Center."

tbyehl 25d ago
SCVMM may technically have the thing you're missing from vCenter... but it's no vCenter. It is a grotesque, MMC plug-in-looking application where nothing quite makes sense to someone accustomed to vCenter or Hyper-V / FCM. Maybe if you're into Azure and slap another layer on top w/ Arc you'll have something that... is less icky but still isn't vCenter. But, hey, The Reg says that VMware is now claiming that vSphere Standard was never really cancelled. https://www.theregister.com/virtualization/2026/09/02/vmware-swings-its-focus-back-to-low-end-server-virt-promises-vsphere-standard-upgrade/5294083 https://www.theregister.com/virtualization/2026/09/02/vmware...
- yardie 24d ago
  Microsoft has done a lot of shitty things, including letting Windows Server and SCVMM languish to push/force their customers to Azure. I've been to a few Ignites and the feeling I got was Server development was starving for resources while the things we've asked for were being deployed to Azure only. I don't think SCVMM is as bad as you portrait. I've used both SCVMM and vCenter. vCenter is so far ahead. And SCVMM was getting there until 2022. When they stopped trying.
  - pjmlp 24d ago
    Windows development in general, sadly, hence why I refer that Microsoft sees Azure as Azure OS. If you think about it, all hyperscalers are hardly any different from old timesharing OSes, the only big difference is the way we get to log into the platform.