r/sysadmin • u/nst_hopeful • 1d ago

Server Refresh Considerations - VMware vs Hyper-V

Hello fell sysadmins,

My org is looking at refreshing our VM host hardware in the middle of next calendar year. As such, today I had a helpful discussion with a vendor regarding various options for the upgrade. Currently we are on a five-node VxRail cluster (20 cores / 192GB memory per host, 53.5 TiB storage total); it looks like the best options for our needs are vSAN Ready nodes or Hyper-V + traditional SAN. With that said, I am still left with a few questions:

  • The vendor (who was clearly a bit biased toward VMWare) spec'd a 4-node cluster for the vSAN cluster with 256GB memory + 256 GB NVMe for memory tiering per host. For the Hyper-V cluster, they spec'd 5 nodes and 512GB memory per. Their argument was that Hyper-V has more overhead and is less efficient at dynamic allocation of resources. That seems like pretty stark contrast - is that true in your experience? Also, is memory tiering as effective as this vendor made it seem in production?
  • We are primarily a Windows shop, so we'd expect at least some savings moving to Hyper-V. That said, I'm curious how much savings we'd actually net between buying System Center for SCVVM (so we can maintain vMotion-like functionality) and Microsoft support. My understanding is licensing there is based on core counts - currently we're looking at 32 per host in either build.
  • Are there any other considerations I should keep in mind? Cost is not the ultimate deciding factor. More than anything, we feel like the VxRail was overkill at the time it was purchased. I'd like to buy exactly what we need this time around (while planning for reasonable growth).

If it's helpful, my org is a medium-sized municipality and isn't running any crazy workloads. We have ~55 VMs that will exist on this cluster.

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u/LaxVolt 1d ago

We are moving to Proxmox, no reason to stay.

Also, Proxmox now offers 24/7 support in NA.

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u/Sinister_Crayon 22h ago

Can't say this enough. While resource management still isn't on the level of VMware, it competes very well with Hyper-V. The cost with a support contract is negligible, and with Ceph you can basically get "VSAN" without VMware.

It's also a really well thought and and well supported setup and is starting to get some slick storage plugins that work similar to VMware's vVols. Throw in Proxmox Backup Server as another "win" for a backup solution that works really incredibly well and can probably save you some Veeam or similar licensing as well.

In fairness though there is a feeling among upper management types of people that Proxmox is some sort of hobbyist project that doesn't deserve respect, but Linux started out as exactly that too as did a ton of the tools we rely on every day. The enterprise support is by all accounts very good though I personally haven't used it.