The acquisition of VMware by Broadcom, announced in May 2022, is a significant event for customers using VMware vSphere and other VMware solutions. Broadcom's acquisition has raised questions about the future strategy for VMware products, pricing, support, and innovation.
For vSphere customers, planning forward in this new environment requires careful consideration of several key factors. Many vSphere users have started to look for alternatives. But what is the best approach to move forward in the current uncertain environment?
Gathering as much information as possible is crucial. However, keep in mind that not all available content—much of which may be negative or speculative—necessarily impacts you or reflects reality.
Understanding the Impact of the Acquisition
Planning Strategies for VMware vSphere Customers
Okay, but what real options are really out there today?
While there are many projects and products available, it is impossible to evaluate them all. We'll continue to add more options in future blogs. Let's start with a very popular choice Proxmox CE.
1. VMware vSphere: The Industry Leader
VMware vSphere is a virtualization platform and a product suite from VMware, a major player in the enterprise virtualization market. It is widely recognized for its advanced features, scalability, and strong industry presence.
Key Features:
- ESXi: VMware's hypervisor, ESXi, is a bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly on server hardware.
- vCenter Server: Provides centralized management for vSphere environments, enabling scalability, centralized control, and advanced features like vMotion, which allows live migration of virtual machines.
- High Availability and Fault Tolerance: vSphere excels in providing high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery capabilities.
- Large Ecosystem: VMware has a vast ecosystem of partners, extensive documentation, professional support, and integrated solutions.
Licensing and Costs:
vSphere uses a proprietary licensing model, which can be quite expensive, especially when including features like vCenter. Different features are available at different tiers of licensing, which can significantly impact the total cost.
2. Proxmox VE: The popular Open Source Alternative
Proxmox VE (Virtual Environment) is an open-source virtualization management solution, which provides a strong alternative to VMware, especially for cost-conscious environments or those preferring open-source software.
Key Features:
- Integrated Environment: Proxmox provides a combined environment for managing KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) instances and LXC containers.
- Web-Based Management Interface: Includes an out-of-the-box, web-based management interface for managing virtual machines and containers.
- Storage and Clustering: Supports a wide range of storage solutions and built-in clustering, allowing servers to be managed together as a single entity.
- Backup and Restore: Built-in backup and restore tools are highly configurable and include features such as scheduled backups and live snapshots.
Licensing and Costs:
Proxmox is free and open-source, with paid support options available from Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH. While the core software is free, Proxmox offers a subscription model for access to enterprise repositories and professional support.
High-Level Differences
When comparing VMware vSphere and Proxmox, here are the high-level differences to consider.
Proxmox is generally more cost-effective, especially for smaller to medium-sized enterprises or those that can manage with community support.
VMware has a more extensive ecosystem and potentially offers better support, which is important for large enterprises with complex needs.
VMware tends to have more advanced features due to its impressive engineering force, particularly in high availability, fault tolerance, and large-scale management capabilities.
On the other hand, Proxmox offers more flexibility due to its open-source nature, appealing to users who prefer open-source solutions for potential customization and integration.
Virtualization Management Solutions
Whatever virtualization platform you use (Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, Proxmox, etc.) you will also have to think about backup/restore, network management etc.
Let’s take performance monitoring as an example, and assume you start using Proxmox next to Vmware vSphere. Most organizations use a performance monitoring product to keep track of their resource usage and resource planning. VMware’s performance monitoring tool can only work with vSphere, but won’t work with Proxmox. And Proxmox’s built-in monitoring tool only works with Proxmox.
In this case, if you plan to start using a dual virtualization platform strategy, a performance monitoring solution capable of measuring both platforms is called for. Opvizor is such a solution. With hundreds of customers using ether vSphere and/or Proxmox, along with other systems such as Microsoft SQL and Windows, Linux, Cisco networking etc., Opvizor is optimally suited to help you implement a dual virtualization platform strategy.
For a more detailed description of Opvizor for Proxmox and vSphere check out this article: https://opvizor.com/blog/elevate-your-virtualized-environments-with-proxmox-ve-monitoring-integration
Summary
This is just the start of our upcoming series of articles covering VMware vSphere alternatives, the advantages and disadvantages.
The importance for every company right now is to look out for alternatives and know the implications of these. Sometimes the overall costs will simply dwarf the license cost increase and sometimes it makes sense to start the migration process early and steady and plan for the next 3-5 years horizon.
You can count on the Opvizor team to support your needs. Whatever virtualization choice you make, there will be an integration into Opvizor. If not, simply reach out to us if something is missing that you’d like us to add.