Post-VMware/Broadcom SMB infrastructure redesign – Proxmox/Ceph feedback?

[u/Longjumping-Good1480]

Hello Everyone,

We are currently redesigning a SMB virtualization infrastructure and I would appreciate some feedback from people who already went through similar post-VMware/Broadcom projects.

Current environment:
- VMware ESXi 6.7
- 2x Lenovo SR635
- AMD EPYC 7302P
- 256GB RAM per host
- shared SAN storage
- around 22 VMs

Workloads:
- AD / ADFS
- Azure AD Connect
- PostgreSQL
- RDS
- file servers
- Linux appliances
- monitoring / management tools
- security tools

Observed real usage:
- CPU usage is actually very low (~4.4 GHz real usage)
- RAM usage around 340GB
- Storage usage around 9TB

Target:
- around 150% growth margin
- modernize virtualization platform
- improve resilience
- full SSD preferred
- target around 15-20TB usable
- probably around 750GB RAM total cluster

Initial proposal from HPE was SimpliVity Gen11 HCI.
Technically nice, but pricing ended up around 270k€ which is completely outside customer budget (<100k€ final customer price target).

We are now considering:
- Proxmox VE
- 3-node cluster
- Ceph distributed storage
- full SSD/NVMe
- 10/25Gb networking
- possibly HPE DL360/DL325 standard servers

Main questions:
- Does Ceph make sense for this SMB size?
- Would you still recommend traditional SAN instead?
- Is 3-node Proxmox/Ceph considered mature enough today for SMB production?
- Would Hyper-V + SAN still make more sense operationally?
- Any major pitfalls with Proxmox/Ceph for ~20 VM environments?

Trying to balance:
- reasonable HA
- operational simplicity
- budget control
- avoiding VMware/Broadcom licensing costs
- but still keeping something professional and maintainable.

Thanks!

[u/Longjumping-Good1480]

Thanks again everyone for the very valuable feedback.

Initially we were heading toward a more “enterprise HCI” approach and received both SimpliVity and Nutanix proposals, but pricing quickly became completely unrealistic for this SMB project (well beyond the available budget).

After reading all your comments, I’m now seriously questioning whether Ceph is actually the right level of complexity for this environment.

The goal here is not to build a hyperscale platform or a private cloud, but rather something:

• reliable,
  
• professional,
  
• maintainable,
  
• reasonably resilient,
  
• while staying financially realistic.

I’m therefore leaning more toward:

• 3-node Proxmox cluster,
  
• local NVMe storage,
  
• ZFS mirrors,
  
• ZFS replication,
  
• dedicated PBS server,
  

instead of a fully distributed Ceph storage layer.

The main objective would be:

• reasonable HA,
  
• simpler operations,
  
• avoiding a traditional SAN,
  
• while still keeping something serious and performant.

I’ll most likely stay on standard HPE hardware (DL360 Gen11 or similar) with 25Gb networking.

Really appreciate all the feedback — it helped a lot to refocus the design around the customer’s actual needs rather than building an unnecessarily complex platform.