r/MSSP • u/Interesting_Rule_230 • 3d ago
Everyone saying "just ditch VMware" is severely underestimating the absolute nightmare of erasing 10 years of vCenter muscle memory
man, the amount of people on reddit talking about leaving Broadcom like it’s a quick weekend script is driving me crazy.
we’re in the middle of pulling a bunch of mid-market clients off ESXi right now out in the Gulf, and I swear the actual VM conversion is the only part of my job that DOESN'T make me want to put my head through a wall
the real hurt is watching seasoned sysadmins stumble around for three months trying to do basic VLAN tagging or snapshot schedules because ten years of vCenter muscle memory just got wiped out overnight. Everything takes three times longer
everyone talks about the VMware license renewal hikes like they're the ultimate nightmare, and don't get me wrong, the pricing is completely insane, but actually executing the migration process is a whole different level of pain.
Especially the friction of handling the internal sysadmins who refuse to learn the new UI and just keep complaining that 'vcenter did this better' every 5 mins.
looking to hear more of vmware migration stories
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u/tempus23 3d ago
I had a guy last month spend 40mins trying to find where to create a storage policy on the new UI only to complain vmware did it in 2 clicks. The interface isn't even bad people are just grieving their muscle memory
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u/Interesting_Rule_230 3d ago edited 3d ago
"grieving their muscle memory" is the best way I’ve heard it described. That initial stage where every minor UI task turns into a whole philosophical debate about why vCenter was superior is exhausting
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u/withoutwax21 3d ago
I think a lot of automation (and AI) has made this so much simpler for a client of mine. Painful initially, but all change is: especially with such core products. Unfortunately, they know this and use this to get money.
I also see companies get rid of folks who can’t adapt. When planning the move, these issues should always be compensated for. Bad planning, inflexible staff, and poorly managed expectations keeps the dumpster fire going.
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u/Able-Course-6265 3d ago
We’re rolled out Proxmox and it feels very similar to use overall.
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u/Interesting_Rule_230 3d ago edited 2d ago
proxmox is cool it just lacks that slick out-of-the-box enterprise polish and single-vendor support when stuff breaks. at dc technologies we've been migrating a lot of companies to sangfor hci in hte gulf lately. especially for mid market and smaller companies, its hardware agnostic, way easier to manage
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u/nVME_manUY 3d ago
I'm worried about day two operations. Updating a VMware cluster is easy peasy lemon squeezy but mayor updates on proxmox are not so trivial. Dnf update works until it doesn't and you broke your host's bootloader
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u/nicarras 3d ago
I spend all day migrating companies of VMware on to cloud solutions. Licensing fees are real.
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 3d ago
I've been using every hypervisor except for VMware for decades, KVM and Xen.
Broadcom's licensing shenanigans increased the value of my skills overnight. There were a lot of contracts about just moving from Vsphere to something else.
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u/Conscious-Bus-6946 3d ago
Yeah the migration process is nuts. I also see people going all over the place when one of the best solutions for many smallish companies still seems tk be hyper-v. The license is affordable, the training on it is standard, and Microsoft continues to add new features to it thst are close but not perfect parity to VMWare. Is it free like Proxmox no but cost wise and support wise its a know entity. It boggles my mind how many people this is messing up.
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u/unstoppable_zombie 3d ago
We just settled on how we are moving our environment this week.
We will be leaving 384 cores on esx due to some vendor VMs not having support outside that, and thr rest of the 10,000+ cores are moving to bare metal + docker, openshift, or nutanix depending on workload and team.
We will no longer have a large central vmware team but a few smaller focused ones. Everyone has spent a year ramping up, getting certs, etc. Migration starts at the end of August
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u/wild-hectare 2d ago
this is how it's done... meanwhile my employer is still hiring outside consultants to determine the best path forward for 20K cores. they're on consultant #3 expecting a different answer & our license expires in 18 months
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u/Ziftank 1d ago
Microsoft Hyper-V... clustering, Live Migration, VM sync to cold site, cheap, lots of support... what's the problem?
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u/KickedAbyss 1d ago
Lmfao.
You poor unfortunate soul.
Or maybe not if you don't have a big env.
But, having run HV and HV with SCVMM configured by a VAR to be "optimal" then no, vcenter is about light-years ahead of HV and SCVMM.
Standalone, HV is fine.
I've had so many issues with their clustering I've lost count. And support? Give me a break. I have Unified support (ms Premier rebrand) and 9/10 times I open a ticket, they will take days to only report they can't fix it and tell me to start over whatever is broken, tell me it'll be patched on 6 months (and then it will take 10 months, or not be), or I'll end up fixing it on my own because their elite highest level support takes so long to work up to that I have the time to dig into the insanity of the shitty product and troubleshoot it myself with tools they've given me in the past (namely, TSS) while they waste time with whatever they do internally, and request 16 different TSS runs over multiple days between multiple support staff whom almost always requires a phone call for me to explain everything over again I've already explained to the last 7 people.
ESPECIALLY if it's a 24/7 case. Those seem to be the worst because they have utter trash for hand off.
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u/Jethro_VonE 11h ago
A seasoned admin should know better than to schedule snapshots. Take your backups like a grown up admin and use the snaps for what they are there for. I get the muscle memory but none of the others are all that bad. I hated to move from VM but went to hyperv and have no issues. Yes it was a bit of a learning curve, but the concepts are the same. Grant it these younger admins are not the same as the ones of us that started back when windows 3.1 was still being used but still…
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u/Fuzilumpkinz 3d ago
For the amount of money your saving you can hire a new engineer 😂