I'm currently helping out a company that recently bought a vSphere Essentials license right before the Broadcom acquisition. After the acquisition, they were informed that Essentials wouldn't be supported anymore and they'd need to switch to vSphere Standard. They decided to hold off for a while, but now there are concerns about not being able to install updates for perpetual licenses and having to roll back to versions that no longer receive support right after critical vulnerabilities were found. With the release of vSphere v9, it seems that those on the vSphere Standard subscription won't be upgraded to the new version either. Given that the upgrade to vSphere Standard was quoted at a steep price and the ongoing costs are likely to rise, I'm exploring alternatives like Hyper-V or Proxmox since they've been using Veeam Community for backups. I'm curious to hear what options others are considering and what factors influenced their decisions!
5 Answers
After looking at several options, we decided on Scale Computing’s flavor of oVirt. The setup was super simple, and we’re saving almost $2 million over five years compared to VMware. It scales nicely and has a really user-friendly interface.
We're transitioning to Hyper-V since we already have the licensing. It’s been a bit of a learning curve since I haven't worked with it in over a decade, but it's not as bad as I expected! Definitely different from VMware though!
I hear you! I probably should have made the switch sooner since we were already paying for it.
How many VMs are you managing? I've heard mixed feelings about Hyper-V from my team.
Proxmox has been my go-to choice. The recent feature rollouts have been impressive, and self-support is straightforward if you have some Linux skills. It's been a solid competitor to VMware for us.
Thanks for sharing! I'm really curious about how Proxmox handles backups.
We’ve been using Nutanix AHV for the past four years and it's been smooth sailing! The migration was straightforward and we haven’t looked back since.
Good to hear, I’m considering Nutanix too!
While we aren't switching yet, I believe we might move to Hyper-V if it comes down to it. For now, we're sticking with VMware since it's been working well for us, but I know things will likely change with pricing and support issues down the line.
Are you still on a perpetual license? That situation is tricky!
We’re in a similar situation; we downgraded our licenses to Standard for five years to allow some time to plan.
Wow, those savings sound amazing!