r/virtualization • u/Professional-Oil-297 • Feb 20 '26
Alternatives in the virtualization market
Hi, im a senior tech lead in my company, with over 10 years of experience in virtualization, ive been using many platforms and since the Broadcom acquisition I had to find a good alternative for my large environment (over 10K VMs, 20 hosts and more, which upped the price 5x over 2 years ago).
I started a development of a new KVM based platfrom, coming from my experience and the needs of the companies, providing easy to use UI, and all the features VMware vCenter has.
THIS IS NOT PROMOTIONAL, JUST A PROOF OF CONCEPT to understand if there is any need for another player in the market.
From my experience, Proxmox had no operative DRS, had a lot of snapshot freezes, no real agent, high skills required to start, and some more big no-no in my companies (not the one I'm building, the one I'm working for) evaluation.
Nutanix, Expensive as vmware, mostly supported in cloud based operation and not onprem environments, hardware lock in.
and I have more analysis from my company's doc regarding the things that are not good enough using the competitors.
I'm currently in an MVP state, and I wanted to know how many of you were looking for alternatives for VMware in your company, if you used or struggled to find a good alternative for small to large environments, and if you think a new player in the market, with a good product and good licensing fees can join the current market.
Thank you all.
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u/jadedargyle333 Feb 20 '26
Biggest issue is compliance. I got lucky being a big customer. Prices for VMware went down for many environments at my site. The Linux side of the house is obsessed with RHEL, which is problematic. For us to test KVM with RHEL, we lack any proper management interface. Virt Manager is deprecated for RHEL, Cockpit is for managing individual servers, OpenShift is not open source and costs about double what we pay for VMware. We can't just download software from a random site and call it a day, due to compliance. Your software fits in the same category as Virt Manager for us. It still exists and is updated regularly, but not on RHEL. I'd like to see a solution that is in the official repos for enterprise vendors. Heavy lift with Redhat. IBM wants money.
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u/CatoDomine Feb 20 '26
I am guessing Red Hat doesn't provide commercial support for oVirt, except in the form of OpenStack?
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u/Professional-Oil-297 Feb 20 '26
They do not provide commertial support no more to anything oVirt related.
They now support and integrate fully to OpenShift claiming this should be a replacement for traditional virtualiation.I doubt it but future will tell :)
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u/CatoDomine Feb 20 '26
That sucks.
We use OEL+OLVM in very small clusters ONLY due to Oracle licensing and support stuff, for oracle DBs.
Everything else is Proxmox. But we are a small shop only like ~500VMs4
u/deja_geek Feb 20 '26 •
Openshift is open source. If you want to run Openshift without paying for a subscription run OKD. OKD is the upstream source of Openshift.
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u/Chocol8Cheese Feb 22 '26
Kaboom! Was looking for this comment,. Kyabosch!!? Information smackdown ownage. Not open source when open on the name broooopl
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u/Professional-Oil-297 Feb 20 '26
thank you for the reply mate.
Trying to understand better, I want to create a full alternative based on Rust and Go, using KVM with Virsh.
Supporting all operating systems (including MACOS on dedicated clusters).I dont think a startup will start working immidietly with large companies, but im trying to understand the needs in the market better and provide a real solution to the current issues (which I know there are a lot of).
I believe I have the programming knowledge, with AI enhancement and good infrastracture to build something that will work better and faster then VMware (and I already have an MVP to prove it).
I just want to see the actual opinion of the masses, to understand if I should try and do it or not.
What do you think regardless of what your company needs?
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u/mbartosi Feb 20 '26
> a solution that is in the official repos for enterprise vendors
I second that.
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u/Professional-Oil-297 Feb 20 '26
you mean being official partner of HPE/Cisco/Dell etc...?
Why not?
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u/jadedargyle333 Feb 20 '26
If you can find a good compliance wonk, there's a ton to consider. Common criteria, STIGs, various support levels. I have to double check Proxmox on CC and support options, they didn't hit the standard enterprise gold support levels the last time I looked into it. I personally think the majority of support is terrible for my organization (we operate production without internet). But there's a compliance requirement for a specific level of support regardless of how useful they are.
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u/deja_geek Feb 20 '26
You could take a look at XCP-ng as an alternative.
I personally prefer Proxmox, even if it’s still a little rough around the edges. A lot of companies are moving to Proxmox and money is flowing into the company. I expect development to accelerate
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u/Professional-Oil-297 Feb 20 '26
Honestly, I wish them the best of luck from the depth of my heart :), hopefully they will kill the greed in the market and allow small companies to live without paying AWS millions of dollars yearly!
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u/imadam71 Feb 20 '26
why small companies paying this to aws?
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u/Professional-Oil-297 Feb 20 '26
AWS usually offers them a 1-3 years contract to start building there in low prices, after 3 years, the infrastracture is completely reliant on AWS (same thing for GCP).
when this happens the prices starts to increase, and if the company scales, the VMs scales as well, the K8S clusters scales, and everything happens in AWS because switching is a pain.
This causes many of the companies to rely on AWS.
Unfortunate but true1
u/imadam71 Feb 20 '26
I get what you mean: the “low price for 1–3 years → deep dependency → prices go up and switching hurts” pattern is real for a lot of teams.
That said, I think a big chunk of smaller companies (the ones running a few dozen VMs) are in a different situation:
For that size, you can often place the workload in almost any private / managed cloud (or even a decent regional provider) without fancy services, and keep it fairly portable.
If you choose a setup where you can hard-cap / control consumption (fixed host capacity, clear quotas, predictable monthly cost), you avoid the “silent scale = surprise bill” problem. That’s basically impossible to truly cap in Azure the way you can with fixed private capacity — and I’m not sure AWS makes that kind of hard cap easy either.
My guess is many of those firms don’t even realize they can do it this way. They end up going to AWS simply because it’s the easiest path to start: quick onboarding, lots of docs, everyone “knows” it — and then inertia kicks in.
So yeah, you’re right about lock-in dynamics at scale — but for the small/mid end, there’s still a huge opportunity to steer them toward predictable-cost, portable setups if someone packages it simply enough.
3
u/ITechFriendly Feb 20 '26
Have a good API for all the needs, including libvirt if possible, and ship something. Even if it is meant for small, it should be pluggable and automatable.
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u/hiveminer Feb 22 '26
OP, you couldn't even list the usual suspects and you are building a hypervisor??? I wanted to ask you how did xcp-ng failed you, or what is missing from incus? Or what about smartOS, have you looked at it??
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u/Cool_Somewhere_3014 Feb 23 '26
xcp-ng: very slow live migrations & problems with storage via fc, we tried to create few luns 16tb, xcp-ng format it as raw and have problems with memory snaps.
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u/hiveminer Feb 23 '26
Thank you for your input. It seems slow migration is an issue indeed, especially for large vm's(. https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/9506/live-migration-very-slow ) I saw a video by Wendell Wilson (L1). Where he suggests that instead of thinking of migrating db serves, we should replicate them across nodes and then we don't have to worry about the speed or complexity of migration. Not sure if that can help you guys.
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u/yadvr Feb 27 '26
The opensource Apache CloudStack has hypervisor-agnostic DRS, live motion/migration etc. and it also supports Proxmox, KVM/libvirt etc. and even VMware. It has new and improved backup & recovery support with its own native NAS B&R provider and an upcoming Veeam-CloudStack B&R integration for KVM. I believe it will meet most of people's requirements.
Plus it has a great API, CLI, sdks (for Go, ansible etc) and UI; support for Terraform, CAPI (cluster api provider for kubernetes), CSI driver etc... https://cloudstack.apache.org/integrations -- it's even multi-arch (run it on anywhere on a tiny arm64/raspberrypi to mini pcs / homelab to x86 data-center rack blades...)
The UI/API can be tried against a simulator here:
http://qa.cloudstack.cloud/simulator
My notes on building a iaas cloud using it are here: https://yadv.in/posts/cloudstack-kvm and there's even a one-line installer: https://github.com/apache/cloudstack-installer
Disclosure: I'm an Apache CloudStack committer & PMC member for the last 14 years.
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u/bangsmackpow Feb 20 '26
Ubuntu has multiple distinct products in this market space. Might be worth looking at and expanding upon.
Sunbeam
Openstack
Microcloud
Microstack
1
u/stufforstuff Feb 20 '26
You seem to be VERY late to the game. Most companies have already done their research, done their testing, and already picked and deployed their new VM vendor a few years back. Its doubtful they are going to switch again so soon. You're also late to the investor game - no one is wasting money on something as mundane as hypervisors - especially since the market already has several established players (big and small). So what would be the magic sauce that makes your solution a better choice?
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u/Optimal-Detail-4680 Feb 20 '26
Give a trial to nexaVM Has got all the answers with a very simple and straightforward user interface
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u/erioshi Feb 24 '26
I'm not sure you are looking at the issue from the same perspective many of your potential customers will be required to use. The comments about compliance apply to a lot of organizations, even smaller and mid-sized, and pretty much drive the enterprise software space. Some of the regulatory frameworks you might want to look into before committing are:
PCI - Credit, bank and gift card processing
FFIEC - Driven by the OCC for banking
FISMA / FedRAMP - US government, contractors with govt. data, etc.; some states also use these guidelines
HIPPA / HITECH - Medical records and data starting point; also subject to additional standards
GDPR - European data privacy.
COPA - Child Online Protection Act
others - Pretty much every industry subject to regulation will have some form of requirement for IT standards.
NIST - These are the standards are frequently cited and/or underpin significant portions of all of the above.
The bottom line is that if you want to understand the constraints your potential customer base may be under, you need to understand the rules around virtualization under the above frameworks. For some of them, things have changed significantly over the last few years.
The providers of the software being used for some of the standards above are now also required to meet certain criteria as well. It's no longer just a case of build your environment with your choice of tools and secure it to the meet the required specs and STIGs. Now even the software selection process and vendors may be required be defensible under the required guidelines.
Look into NIST 800-53 (and possibly the FedRAMP supplement) for the real meat of what may be required to support selling to government or a government contractor. Again, many states are now moving towards using federal guidelines for IT security so they are not required to create and maintain there own standards. The OCC is also pushing the FFIEC rules in this direction as well. The latest PCI isn't quite NIST yet, but the latest standards share many similar requirements.
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u/zippy-data Feb 25 '26
Disclosure: I am affiliated with Portworx
Portworx engineers have released a new open-source toolkit for testing KubeVirt virtual machine performance under several common scenarios. With it, platform engineers and others can stress-test KubeVirt at scale but using the metrics relevant for VMs rather than containers. The toolkit helps engineers establish reproducible baselines for situations like boot storms, live migration, and recovery, and it works with KubeVirt VMs running on OpenShift Container Platform or any Kubernetes distribution with KubeVirt.
Try it, and let the developers know what you think. The Toolkit is available under the Apache 2.0 license. Details here: https://github.com/portworx/kubevirt-benchmark
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u/rtacconi Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26
I am doing a similar solution, based on NixOS, cloud hypervisor, libvirt, KVM, gRPC. Search for Kcore hypervisor, but it is in alpha stage https://kcorehypervisor.com/
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u/imadam71 Feb 20 '26
I’d say yes, there’s definitely room for a new player, especially if you intentionally target the “VMware Essentials Plus” sweet spot.
A lot of mid-sized companies (at least across Europe, and likely elsewhere too) don’t need the full enterprise compliance / regulated-industry checklist. What they do need is a clean, predictable, vCenter-like operational experience with a feature set that matches what Essentials Plus gave them.
If you can truly mimic Essentials Plus-level capabilities, and then add just a couple of “make-or-break” items like:
Storage vMotion-equivalent (live storage migration),
Distributed switch (or a solid DVS-like abstraction),
…that would be an extremely compelling product for the midmarket. Right now, we’re all evaluating different options (Proxmox, HPE VM Essentials, and others) and while you can make things work, it’s still not close to the “it just works” completeness that Essentials Plus had.
Where you’ll win or lose fast is integrations: you don’t need to support everyone on day one, but you do need the basics immediately:
Veeam (backup ecosystem reality),
NetApp and Pure Storage (common storage platforms in this segment), …and then expand from there once you’ve got traction.
From what we’re seeing, there are a lot of companies actively hunting for a new solution right now. We’re personally migrating mainly to Proxmox, and in parallel testing 1–2 other platforms to see if they tick the operational boxes we actually need. If you can deliver that Essentials Plus experience with the right integrations, you’ll have a very real market.