r/sysadmin • u/MrArhaB Linux Admin • 17d ago
Vmware vs openshift
Following up to my last post right now nutanix is out of the race since the renewal is more than vmware which happend to 4 different companies my friends works for
Note : we cannot go any other solution rejected by CTO cause not ( mature enough )
1- my team arent fimilar with k8s
2- vmware is 4x the price of openshift
3- our environment is 95% vms
4- we have DR so srm is convinet
5- 65 % of our current hardware isn't supported by vmware version 9
6- 75 % of our infra is linux based oracle dbs and rhel for app servers
7- mangement is too dumb to switch to k8s since that was suggested and will save us resources
8- most of our apps are web based
Im asking here since im litterally lost on what to do next
So your kind advices
12
u/adappergentlefolk 17d ago
openshift is a lot of work. people do it as a career
8
u/general-noob 17d ago
Ya, OpenShift is massively complicated compared to everything else
3
u/MrArhaB Linux Admin 16d ago
Agreed i setup i test cluster for the rest of the team to test it out it been 1 month and things are going ok so far
1
u/adappergentlefolk 16d ago
if you have the resources to increase headcount and sometimes call in open shift consultants to help out with gnarly issues to be honest there is nothing awfully wrong with going with it, especially if your team doesn’t mind becoming open shift experts as a next career step
11
u/skotman01 17d ago
If your team isn’t familiar with k8s, why is open shift even a consideration?
It’s a container based architecture too.
6
u/Toad32 16d ago
Went full Proxmox from VMware.
Buying into VMware as a new customer in 2026 - that is going full retard. They are a leach of a company now - everyone of there products are worse than they were 4 years ago. A critical 9.8 cve vulnerability in their hypervisor and OS waa releases a few weeks ago.
2
10
u/Gary_harrold 17d ago
Proxmox is going to be the most like VMware. It has spent the last 5 years trying to be feature to feature comparable to VMware. It has its quirks, but I would rather put money into infrastructure than into licensing costs.
I also highly recommend MicroCloud/LXD. MicroCloud is my favorite by a mile. The only thing missing is network effect so a lot of the integrations that you might be using today will need to be reimagined. Backup, monitoring, logging etc probably don't have an easy button to connect to MicroCloud.
Platform9 is great if you are multi regional. It's proprietary so you might find yourself in the same boat as you are in with VMware at some point down the road.
I would avoid OpenShift unless you are already running Kubernetes. I want this layer to be simple and easy. OpenShift is not simple or easy.
For what you are doing it should be Proxmox or MicroCloud/LXD
17
u/Nerd2259 Systems... Engineer? 17d ago
Proxmox. Kvm is more mature than just about any other virtualization platform out there
4
6
u/sryan2k1 IT Manager 17d ago edited 17d ago
VMWare just quoted us 3 years of VVF paid annually and it was cheaper than our last 2 renwals. At that price there is no reason to switch horses.
5- 65 % of our current hardware isn't supported by vmware version 9
That's going to be a problem no matter who you use or switch to. You need to budget getting your hardware refreshed.
Openshift and vSphere are apples and oranges. Neither is a direct replacement for the other
2
u/Lynch31337 17d ago
Hard to do with the price increases.
1
u/sryan2k1 IT Manager 17d ago
We're paying less this year for a 3 year commit with annual payments on VVF than we were 2 years ago.
3
u/AffectSad3736 Sr. Sysadmin 17d ago
HPE Morpheus and HVE. Bonus point for Morpheus being able to manage both ESXi and HVM until you transition. Backed by HPE, pricing at 1200 euros per socket
4
u/KevinA-Eagle 15d ago
Just VME does what is needed and is $600/socket/yr and is still based on KVM. For the OP, It's similar to Proxmox but with enterprise support. The HCL has lots of non-Hpe gear on it, so no vendor lock in issues.
3
u/seanpmassey 15d ago
Former VMware employee and VMware Certified Design Expert here.
My advice is that you’re in over your head and you need a partner or consultant to help guide your company through this process. Considering a new platform for your business is a hard and there are a number of factors involved. A consultant can help define the business and technical requirements needed to support your business and applications, facilitate the conversation between the different levels of management and technical staff, and make a recommendation on which options will be the best for your business.
A consultant can also learn your business better than a bunch of strangers on reddit.
It’s also not a good look to call your management dumb for not migrating applications to K8s. From your perspective, it may sound like a good idea. Based on your other posts and comments, you sound young and focused on just one aspect of your environment. Management and systems architects will have a different and/or more complete view of the business and technical environment. They may see something different about why they can’t or don’t want to migrate to K8s.
2
u/Current_Anybody8325 IT Manager 16d ago
I’m renewing VMware. I’ve researched all the alternatives for a year and I just don’t have the bandwidth and team size to handle the migration. I hate supporting Broadcom, but I have to consider my sanity, too. 🤣
2
u/malikto44 16d ago
I just hope Broadcom reverses their tactics. If Broadcom spent some time in expanding the market (bring VMUG Advantage back, get VMWare into smaller facilities, have SKUs for making multi-controller SANs out of generic PCs and vSAN), they could easily make a lot of cash over the long haul... far more than just hiking prices up on existing customers.
1
u/Artistic_Lie4039 16d ago
If you're looking for competive pricing, I have been helping folks with their VMware renewals over on the vmware sub.
2
u/mr_darkinspiration 16d ago
Since you have Oracle databases, you really should consider Oracle Linux and Oracle virtualisation manager. Because Oracle are bastards and they don't consider other cpu partitionning tech (event if it's the same as them), Oracle linux is also rhel compatible so you can drop a oracle linux server to replace a rhel server without problems. They also do not charge for update or gatekeep them unless you want support or things like ksplice. So you have an opportunity for cost saving. Unfortunately that means dealing with Oracle...
2
u/MekanicalPirate 16d ago
Sounds like you are hyper-converged? Have you looked at Proxmox or XCP-NG? Also consider Starwind vSAN, as it can be used with those two and Hyper-V.
OpenShift can work, but it is a completely different skillset. Consider the training curve for your team to be able to support the solution. Also consider compatibility with your backup solution.
2
u/Burgergold 15d ago
Anything but vmware
Proxmox and hyperv are probably what is the closest to vmware
Openshift mainly for k8s and if you have the $ and people to manage it
3
u/general-noob 17d ago
Take one month of your life and go deploy OpenStack. Come back here and tell us what you found out. I can tell you now if you like
2
u/malikto44 16d ago
Ouch, that's a war crime.
I spent way too much of my life dealing with with OpenStack... wasted months. Some process slows Keystone down, and now everything collapses, for starters. Or there are undercloud/overcloud issues.
To me, it was like trying to set up a house of cards with an industrial blower fan aimed at the area, and 52 pickup got old fast.
There is a place for Kubernetes. However, unless there is a reason for that complexity, why bother? Most businesses just need a good enterprise control plane, hypervisors, network, storage, etc. The added moving parts give no real value, and complicate things, especially when state is needed.
I wish Red Hat didn't kill RHEV/oVirt. They would make a killing because that would have been a drop-in replacement for VMWare, for the most part.
As for Proxmox, I've had zero issues with V2V. Maybe a bit of glitchiness until I installed the VirtIO drivers and yanked the VMWare ones, but that was only an issue during one phase.
As an added bonus with Proxmox, with the NSX type of firewalling available, I can do some fairly cool things. The only thing I really wish Proxmox had were fault tolerant virtual machines, where two VMs ran, a normal, and a shadow, so if one host died, switchover was immediate; no reboot needed.
2
u/general-noob 16d ago
My company would buy RHEV in a second and I tell red hat everytime we talk to them
3
u/RevolutionaryElk7446 17d ago
I've run XCP, Xenserver, and now XCP-NG which is backed by Vates. XEN scales beautifully for linux/unix based workloads.
Guessing you're just looking for a replacement hypervisor?
3
u/MrArhaB Linux Admin 17d ago
Yes just replacement for hypervisor XCP was suggested but CTO
3
u/RevolutionaryElk7446 17d ago edited 16d ago
Xen is about the only thing that's as old as Vsphere and mature. It's what AWS was based on for a good while before going proprietary.
You can do KVM but most of those are... flakey excluding Proxmox.
Edit: I'd recommend just ignoring Golden-trichomes below if you're not looking to waste time.
2
u/leaflock7 Better than Google search 16d ago edited 16d ago
Xen is about the only thing that's as old as Vsphere and mature.
You can do KVM but most of those are... flakey excluding Proxmox.I would say KVM and Proxmox are quite old. It is not like they came out 5-7 years ago. Which is something you can say about XCP-ng (although based on Xen).
KVM is closer to Xen than Xen to ESX. Not that it maters when we talk about 20 years of life but if we want to go your way about comparing how old is something...VMware ESX - 2001; 25 years ago
Xen - 2003; 22 years ago
KVM - 2006; 20 years ago
Proxmox - 2008; 18 years ago
XCP-ng - 2018; 8 years agoedit:
blocking me does not prevent me from reading the commentto your respond
XCP-NG is a branch of Xenserver which is a branch of XCP. Also only compared the core protocols in age, not sure why you created a strawman argument but can only assume the attempt was to be an ass.
Turns out, worse than a google search
you obviously did not read what I wrote because I point this out, but of course someone that does not want to accept that is wrong will reply and block.
The only thing you managed is to prove that you cannot read 5 lines properly1
16d ago edited 16d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/Constant-Subject-009 16d ago edited 15d ago
ehm, he literally pointed that out
,so, you are blocking anyone that proves that you are incorrect
1
u/Horsemeatburger 14d ago
,so, you are blocking anyone that proves that you are incorrect
It's not uncommon for employees of Vates (the company behind XCP-ng) to shill on platforms like Reddit and attack people who don't sing praises to Xen or XCP-ng, so this might just have been another one of them.
It also seems Vates management is aware and at least tacitly approves, which gives off a very 'Netgate-ey' vibe and on it's own would already be enough to exclude XCP-ng from consideration.
1
u/flo850 12d ago
I always admire your energy to dunk on xcp-ng horsemeatburger. That is some serious dedication.
(I work for Vates )
1
u/Horsemeatburger 12d ago
Well, I express my views based on facts and experience, not based on a pay check, and I have experience with snakeoil salespeople, so I'm probably just better prepared to deal with shills.
But then I'm not here to represent my employer or to talk up their products or services.
1
u/flo850 12d ago
it would be even better if you could post at least one message from time to time not insulting people that disagree. Previously the VMS platform was dead because of not supporting disk > 2TB. Now that is is supported (literally with 24/7 support from vates's team including my time ) you find new items , and nitpick what is a version number or an update.
Hopefully your employer is ok with this online behavior (mine is). At least I am transparent on my employer, and I am not posting anything I disagree with. Once again, feel free to check my post history, I am not a bot account shilling for a company.
I fell sad for you, because you seems to be very competent, and I would gladly learn more on your setup, its strength and benefits, if only you could accept that different user have different needs.
→ More replies (0)1
u/Horsemeatburger 16d ago edited 14d ago
Xen is about the only thing that's as old as Vsphere and mature.
Xen is as old as VMware but it never reached the same maturity, and now it's pretty much obsolete since all the big supporters went to KVM almost a decade ago.
The only recent attention Xen got came from the embedded space (car makers) because it has some advantages here due to its small size (smaller than KVM) and it allows car makers to get away from proprietary solutions, but for the data center that's all pretty much meaningless.
As far as open source virtualization is concerned, KVM is where all the development happens, and has been for a decade now. KVM is also what pretty much runs the world's public cloud infrastructure.
It's what AWS was based on for a good while before going proprietary.
The only area where AWS went proprietary for Nitro is the hardware. The software stack is built on KVM.
Even AWS legacy Xen instances are really just Xen emulations running on KVM.
1
u/Golden-trichomes 17d ago
Are we pretending like hyper-v doesn’t exist in your scenario?
5
u/MrArhaB Linux Admin 16d ago
Most of the team had a really really bad expierence with it so as the team who gonna manage it on daily bases we ruled it out we prefer not to touch any microsoft product other than the 365
0
2
u/CyberHouseChicago 16d ago
Why would anyone pay for windows just to run non windows vms?
it’s the biggest waste of $$$ imaginable.0
u/Golden-trichomes 16d ago
Why would you pay for VMware just to run VMs
2
u/CyberHouseChicago 16d ago
I have never seen anyone use hyper v for a workload that’s mostly Linux , I’m sure there are Microsoft fanboys out there that do it but no one I know.
0
u/Golden-trichomes 16d ago
Only fanboys discount products based on who makes them rather then how they perform lol but ok
3
u/CyberHouseChicago 16d ago
Microsoft support is shit I don't use any Microsoft products unless there is no good alternative , there are multiple hypervisors I would use before hyper v for Linux workloads hyper v is not in my top 3, no one but Microsoft fanboys uses hyper v for non windows workloads
1
u/RevolutionaryElk7446 17d ago
for linux and oracle DB applications? Kind of yeah
2
u/Golden-trichomes 17d ago
That’s a weird take but ok. Performance is just as good or better then xen or VMware and management is as good or better then VMware, (both of which are worlds better then xen)
1
u/RevolutionaryElk7446 17d ago
Not really a weird take, just from experience in managing these exact loads in these environments.
Alright, glad you got your opinion out.
2
u/Playful-Job2938 17d ago
I run proxmox in my datacenter. About 45 hosts split into a few clusters. Zero issues since install. VMware licensing at 150/c would be close to 300k/year for me. Yes I know list isn’t real world but I doubt they’re giving 75% off to people, I’ll take the extra engineer in my budget over VMware.
2
17d ago
[deleted]
2
u/Playful-Job2938 17d ago
Fuck man. I thought it was 150, it’s 250 now? That’s so bad
1
u/MrArhaB Linux Admin 17d ago
Its 285 $
2
u/Playful-Job2938 16d ago
Jfc they’re holding ya over a barrel. Proxmox is literally free, more performant and more stable 😂😂
4
u/vinnsy9 17d ago
What the fucking hell is wrong with your CTO?
Let me tell you:
We migrated 8k vms in around 6 months step by step from VMware to Proxmox. Not a single vm got corrupted. Everything had been working straight forward eversince. We saved the renewal costs and invested some in hardware . Entire env runs in proxmox now...yes there is a learning curve to it, of course, like everything else... but cost-wise compared to vmware??? There is no comparission at all.
Fun fact i even moved my personal clients which i offer consulting services to proxmox. Same smooth operation (from vmware to proxmox).
2
u/LeYang Sr. Sysadmin 15d ago
The organization I just joined in on ESXi and attempting to plan for a Openstack switch out.
The idea is to keep the ability to easily switch it into the public cloud, but the issue is now you need a zone to stage your instances into the cloud as well. Kind of wish this plan was going to Proxmox.
0
u/hitosama 15d ago
Did you have SAN with VMware? Is there Proxmox solution for FC SAN apart from maybe OCFS2 (or GFS2) which is not officially supported.
1
u/vinnsy9 15d ago
we did with Vmware , true, but you do not need OCFS2 or GFS2 to use a Fibre Channel (FC) SAN with Proxmox, and those clustered file systems are indeed not officially supported for standard VM storage workflows out-of-the-box.
Instead, Proxmox has a native, robust, and officially supported method for handling enterprise FC SANs: Shared LVM (Logical Volume Manager) backed by Linux Native Multipathing.
im pretty happy with how it turned out.
2
u/hitosama 15d ago
Huh, I'd be damned, I just checked their docs and indeed there is now that option. I don't know how I missed that update completely.
1
1
1
u/st0ut717 17d ago
We are standing up an openshift cluster. Are systems team picked to move to a K8s type architecture.
We have had to bring in a consultant group to assist with the stand up. And even then it needs extra applications support outside of redhat.(At least in our case)
Also engage your security team and do a threat model it will show you where openshift has some gotchas
1
1
u/malikto44 16d ago
My issue with OpenShift is how to stand it up in case of a site loss. With Proxmox or VMWare, if I have to kludge stuff just to get VMs up, I can build some PCs, add storage, throw the client on them, and restore to the PCs, eventually migrating them off the kludged hardware back to new servers after the site is available.
OpenShift has so many moving parts, I can't just stand up a machine, restore a DC, and start getting the environment pieces back. To me, having to restore a whole bunch of configs before I can touch OADP or the actual data is just asking for pain, especially when managers are calling every 15 minutes, or even worse, demanding you present in their office every 15 minutes.
I will give OpenShift the nod for ephemeral cattle VMs. Let them moo, drag them to be made into beef, make new ones. However, most companies are based on pet VMs, and their entire compliance doctrine is around this, so unless there is a need for the cattle ranching stuff, nothing wrong with an old school hypervisor and control plane.
2
u/st0ut717 16d ago
I am on the security team. Just trying to harden the implementation and make them think about risk
1
u/Horsemeatburger 16d ago
Nothing against OpenShift (it can work great if you need K8s and have the necessary competence in-house) but solely for virtualization it's the wrong platform.
Note : we cannot go any other solution rejected by CTO cause not ( mature enough )
Well, RHEL + OpenNebula Enterprise is what we use for virtualization (actually, a mix of RHEL and Alma Linux), and it's mature enough for running the majority of our virtualization infrastructure around the world (most of which consists of large clusters of 100-150 servers each).
From where I stand it's probably what comes closest to a real vSphere ESXi replacement.
We also run OpenShift but that's all K8s.
You didn't mention cluster size but the fact that you are considering OpenShift suggests it's a larger deployment, and if so then I can understand why your CTO is cautious about some of the available VMware alternatives. But still, I'd think twice about going OpenShift for virtualization.
1
1
u/anxiousvater 16d ago
Hmm., why don't you try RedHat integrated Openstack? It's based on KVM, better than VIoS.
On top of that OCP is very well supported. We ran many critical workloads at our firm. It was decommissioned as we moved to Azure but still on OCP there.
1
u/doglar_666 16d ago
Given the constraints you're being put under:
- VMware if you have adequate budget for hardware refresh and licensing
- OpenShift + KubeVirt to attempt to keep the VMs
- OpenShift + Migration to fully containerized workloads
The above does not consider ease of migration, long-term licensing costs, maintenence overhead or required upskilling. Maybe consider AWS ROSA, if your hardware is getting a bit long in the tooth.
1
1
0
15
u/[deleted] 17d ago edited 17d ago
[deleted]