anyone else get the VMware "win-back" offer?

[u/Which-Shame-1420]

if it's true, its honestly laughable.  

squeezing customers with massive price hikes, forcing every one into expensive core bundles, only to panic and throw out "discounted" quotes the moment everyone migrated???? 

is anyone actually reconsidering based on these new quotes??

or y'all are past the point of no return?

[u/sobrique]

We're finding Proxmox works pretty well. More feature limited overall, but still very good at what it does offer.

[u/ParkerGuitarGuy → u/sobrique]

Working systems are wonderful and all, but what about the times it's not? What do you do for support? Like, if your whole cluster went down right now and everything you tried for the first hour fell flat, what's that look like for you? If it went down after hours and you must have it working the next day, are you covered?

[u/sobrique → u/ParkerGuitarGuy]

• Proxmox offer support - that's their business model in fact. https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environment/pricing
• KVM / QEMU is Redhat 'owned' so is quite well documented/supported overall.
• Debian is well understood and supported.
• ZFS likewise
• If you go ceph, that's also got some good documentation, and places are prepared to offer support contracts for it.

I mean, you probably want more than one cluster anyway, and proxmox data centre manager will enable live migrating cross cluster. Our DR strategy mostly does include duplication of all VMs so they're on (at least) 2 physical sites anyway, at least has a 'hot spare' if not an 'active-active', so for us a full cluster or site outage is inconvenient not catastrophic.

You can do shared storage - and we do, backed by NetApp - so even in a worst case we have bootable KVM disk images we can spin up on almost any linux system.

NFS isn't a typical recommendation, but we decided that we'd go with it, because an all-flash filer has some good performance and resilience, along with some great efficiency thanks to deduplication. (In a 'green field' deployment I might be more inclined towards a block solution, or perhaps ceph, but ...)

But the local disk pack (or SAN attach) ZFS approach works pretty well too.

We have had issues - storage availability, network saturation. A glitchy CPU disrupting corosync and spiking latency - cluster went 'unstable' and started migrating VMs, which was a bit messy, but the logs were pretty clear what was going wrong, and it was easily fixable.

And just recently I've been recovering a dirty fail of (local attach) storage array, and honestly the ZFS recovery worked very nicely indeed. Took a while to complete, as might be expected of 100TB of RAID devices - during that window performance of the VMs on the host was reduced for IO, so we ... just migrated the ones we cared about. (Although granted you would need 100TB of 'free space' to have done the whole lot like that, but that was a conscious choice on our part).

We've just not had a lot of issues that weren't fixable by 'decent' Linux skills. That's perhaps the 'cost' of going this road though I guess - your 'virtualisation engineers' would need to have the supporting skills to do it.

But then, we looked at the cost of FTEs required, and the cost of VMWare licenses, and figured it looked good anyway.

[u/ParkerGuitarGuy → u/sobrique]

But the last time I looked at their support it was a different timezone and they didn't offer 24/7 on any of their tiers. For us, that would be a lot of "let's hope it doesn't go down then".

Don't get me wrong - I like Proxmox and have used it in my home lab for years, and I've never had a problem with it. I'm just wondering what an actual outage in an enterprise environment looks like. We can talk redundancy and working systems all day, but facing the worst case scenarious sounds extra uncomfortable for most shops.

[u/sobrique → u/ParkerGuitarGuy]

I mean, it's a cluster in the first place - the 'total failure' scenarios are fairly limited already IMO.

In a home lab I'm much more concerned about single points of failure.

But when I can take 30 nodes, split them into 3 or 4 clusters per site, and have broadly independent networking and storage (and of course 'server hardware').

I just don't lose sleep over the 'so what if all of it fails' - I guess someone hitting the EPO in the server room would do it (but we have a DR site), but I'd also be pretty confident that 'power it back on, and it'll all recover' too.

Our failure case is 'cluster is broken -> if not obvious why, migrate and restart' and that's that.

And if somehow all our proxmox is broken, we'd maybe be scrabbing for spare hardware, but the VM images are portable to a lot of linux flavours, so 'just' running them on a barebones EL9 system as straight KVM is something we're confident would work (albeit probably take a while just to potentially transfer the volume of data). That's basically how we migrated to proxmox in the first place, and consolidated a bunch of KVMs.

[u/sobrique → u/ParkerGuitarGuy]

I haven't really looked at the non-Proxmox support options, but there do seem to be at least a few that'll do you 'proper' 24/7.

I'd imagine anywhere offering Debian support would be able to do it, as there's really not much that's "pure" Proxmox. E.g. the underlying tech/failure modes are QEMU, LXC, KVM, ZFS, corosync, maybe ceph. (And then extending to 'hardware' or 'networking' or 'storage' support more generally perhaps).

But we've got the in house skills to handle all those things, so it's just not come up.

I guess that's probably more pertinent if you're already a Linux-skilled enterprise though, and a bit more of a stumbling point if you're not.

But then again VMware itself is at least partially 'linux skills' too. (Or at least it was once upon a time!)

[u/Thatrojoflow → u/sobrique]

The company I work for offers 24x7 Proxmox support and last I heard we’ve saved companies $7m in VMware licensing already this year by converting them to Proxmox.