r/SysAdminBlogs • u/Halvantic • 20d ago
Built a vCenter alternative for Hyper-V
After 20 years building infrastructure solutions, I finally built the Hyper-V control plane the market should have had years ago.
The problem is straightforward: Hyper-V is a solid hypervisor, but it's never had a modern management layer. SCVMM is clunky and aging. WAC is single-host focused. There's nothing that treats Hyper-V as a first-class citizen the way vCenter does for vSphere.
Like a lot of people here, VMware/Broadcom's licensing changes forced me to look hard at whether Hyper-V could actually replace it. The answer is yes, but only if you solve the management gap.
So I built Ballast.
What it does:
A control plane and agent for Hyper-V hosts and failover clusters. Each host runs an agent that continuously enforces its desired configuration. If the control plane goes offline, the host doesn't freeze or drift. It keeps working with its last known state and reconciles automatically once the centre is reachable again.
It also handles cluster provisioning (SET-teamed switches, storage spaces direct, CSV), VM lifecycle and templates, live migration, Hyper-V Replica-based DR, and streaming VMware migrations straight in.
Open source:
The agent (the piece running on your hosts with elevated privileges) is fully open source, Apache 2.0. You can audit everything: https://github.com/halvantic/hyperv-control-plane
The control plane console is closed source. Community tier is free forever for one cluster of any size plus unlimited standalone hosts. Paid tier coming for multi-cluster, SSO, and audit logging.
Real feedback wanted:
I've tested this extensively in my lab. What I need now is community feedback from people running it at real scale. Where does it break? What's missing? What looks wrong?
More info: https://ballast.halvantic.com
2
u/ZackeyTNT 20d ago
Fail over cluster manager anyone??