I got my current job because I could lead the hyper-v to VMware migration project. Just this year I led the VMware to hyper-v migration project. VMware was such a great product (although a bit cumbersome in the VCF environment I managed). It’s really unfortunate it went the way of Broadcom. In comparison Hyper-v feels like a typical Microsoft product. A bunch of different tools created by different teams to do tasks that feel bolted on and afterthoughts. I have to run FCM to manage the nodes? But I run HVM to manage the roles? But there’s no overall resource management like VMware vsphere or proxmox does natively?
I’ve quietly built a proxmox cluster in our environment for semi-prod workloads for when the inevitable windows host has issues.
I've lead roughly $20M in cloud migration projects in the last two years away from vmware to cloud services as replacements. Just insane what MBAs are willing to do to a product to squeeze short term profits. Even more insane that this country largely sees these people as a benefit to society and not the vultures they are.
I actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows over the years that once I tried out hyper-v for the first time last year, I somehow have never touched vmware again. Sure vmware has better configs, cleaner interface and some very subtle design advantages. But damn, hyper-v just fucking works and it keeps working across updates. I have a VM that has been running for a year and it is still perfectly doing exactly what it should. I never experienced that with vmware.
> I actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows...
I assume this means that you were using Vmware Workstation? The VDDK is for Vmware vSphere, which -IIRC- runs on Linux and coordinates computers running ESXi, which are where vSphere VMs actually run.
Not that many people are going to be using Vmware Workstation to run a large number of VMs.
> VMware to Proxmox migrations are not affected ...
Amusingly - and acknowledging tiny scale and modest automation requirements of home lab compared to enterprise - as I started migrating to Proxmox a year or two ago, the process of shuffling VMs off my ESXi servers and onto Proxmox was surprisingly painless. Effectively mount the ESXi as storage systems, and then 'copy to here'.
IIRC the only small challenges were a conservative choice on target VM's CPU type (Proxmox seems to dislike defaulting to 'host' CPU) and the network / SCSI controller defaults. I assume designed to prioritise robustness over performance.
> I am of the school of thought that even if Broadcom gives VMware Standard away free for a year, it would be hard to convince customers that they need to stick with the platform
Yep. They're building the cage around you. Why would you stick around?
We run a lot of ESXi with vSphere (part of overall VCF solution). It works very well. But I am part of Big Corp. so they don’t mind paying. We are good via warranties etc using what we already purchased. I don’t know that I share the same sentiment that we could have just used ProxMox. We are a Dell heavy shop and there is a new Dell Private Cloud product that is very promising. More like choose your own adventure.
> […] could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares.
As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago.
Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenStack is useful for many large scale environments (especially with tenant isolation and usage tracking/billing/chargebacks).
Proxmox is good a good solution for SMBs, but (especially pre-9.x) there were a bunch of things that made it much less usable for large(r) scale deployments IMHO.
I too ran a large VDI, server, and scientific computing cluster based on Linux - libvirt in my case. I saved a bunch of money over VMware. When I quit to go to a higher paying job, they had to rip and replace everything with vSphere because they couldn't find anyone willing to work for .edu money with the skills to manage that despite the massive cost savings.
I had asked for vSphere to avoid this problem, and they balked at the licensing costs even in the good ol' days.
> I was working on a pretty big proxmox setup back in 2016...
Define "pretty big". Proxmox officially supports up to 32 nodes in a cluster and the Proxmox folks themselves have "seen clusters of around ~24 nodes in production" (as of 2025) and for "bigger clusters than that, fine-tuning might be necessary":
There are folks talking about running things in the high-40s and low-50s, but that's not officially support. If you have beefy hardware you can fit a lot of VMs on a single hypervisor (I've always found running out of RAM is often the limit).
A single ESXi cluster can have up to 64 nodes, and vCentre can handle multiple clusters. Proxmox recently released Cluster Manager, which helps with feature parity.
I'm a happy user of Proxmox for a number of years (and helped ran OpenStack before that), but I think for large(r) scale deployments (and even smaller ones) there's a good reason which VMware was so popular. (How many folks are actually at that scale is a different question.)
Anyone larger like that automatically also can afford the staff to simply address any shortcomings in-house and then own it forever, and perfectly tailored, and perfectly customizable at any time forever. There is no missing feature that a few hours or days of developer time doesn't erase.
Oh it's crude on day one? So what? You're still operating and on your own terms, and every week a few more minutes of work gets added as little pain points get addressed by whoever cares, and before you know it it's better than anything you can buy, and the total cost was less than your previous licensing, and you never had to deal with a serial number or license manager or account rep, never had to care one bit about counting cpu cores or client seats or vms or physical hosts or ips or backup copies or spinning up new dev boxes or more production without warning or any of that bs.
The bigger you are, the less you need the convenience of outsourcing, not more.
> The bigger you are, the less you need the convenience of outsourcing, not more.
Quite often the bigger you are the more the higher ups want risk to be mitigated, and so are often glad to cut a cheque to be able to yell at someone over the phone.
The other aspect is that they want fungibility. As a corporation, you use off-the-shelf solutions so that when you do your big layoffs every few years you can rotate in some other cogs who already know how to operate the standard solution. Building in-house means valuing your employees long-term and we can't have any of that going on.
I’ve quietly built a proxmox cluster in our environment for semi-prod workloads for when the inevitable windows host has issues.
I assume this means that you were using Vmware Workstation? The VDDK is for Vmware vSphere, which -IIRC- runs on Linux and coordinates computers running ESXi, which are where vSphere VMs actually run.
Not that many people are going to be using Vmware Workstation to run a large number of VMs.
> VMware to Proxmox migrations are not affected ...
Amusingly - and acknowledging tiny scale and modest automation requirements of home lab compared to enterprise - as I started migrating to Proxmox a year or two ago, the process of shuffling VMs off my ESXi servers and onto Proxmox was surprisingly painless. Effectively mount the ESXi as storage systems, and then 'copy to here'.
IIRC the only small challenges were a conservative choice on target VM's CPU type (Proxmox seems to dislike defaulting to 'host' CPU) and the network / SCSI controller defaults. I assume designed to prioritise robustness over performance.
All automatable, I'm sure.
Yep. They're building the cage around you. Why would you stick around?
As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago.
Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenStack is useful for many large scale environments (especially with tenant isolation and usage tracking/billing/chargebacks).
Proxmox is good a good solution for SMBs, but (especially pre-9.x) there were a bunch of things that made it much less usable for large(r) scale deployments IMHO.
It does help that I have thirty years Linux experience compared to the paltry twenty five or so of VMware (which was RedHat plus stuff back in day)
I also have rather a lot of Hyper V exposure too and I defy you to love its iSCSI and networking, let alone that awful vTPM thingie.
It's Proxmox for me, any day. Even when I've completely knackered it I can always boot a systemrescuecd and mount and chroot the thing back to life.
I had asked for vSphere to avoid this problem, and they balked at the licensing costs even in the good ol' days.
Define "pretty big". Proxmox officially supports up to 32 nodes in a cluster and the Proxmox folks themselves have "seen clusters of around ~24 nodes in production" (as of 2025) and for "bigger clusters than that, fine-tuning might be necessary":
* https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-with-48-nodes.1746...
There are folks talking about running things in the high-40s and low-50s, but that's not officially support. If you have beefy hardware you can fit a lot of VMs on a single hypervisor (I've always found running out of RAM is often the limit).
A single ESXi cluster can have up to 64 nodes, and vCentre can handle multiple clusters. Proxmox recently released Cluster Manager, which helps with feature parity.
I'm a happy user of Proxmox for a number of years (and helped ran OpenStack before that), but I think for large(r) scale deployments (and even smaller ones) there's a good reason which VMware was so popular. (How many folks are actually at that scale is a different question.)
Oh it's crude on day one? So what? You're still operating and on your own terms, and every week a few more minutes of work gets added as little pain points get addressed by whoever cares, and before you know it it's better than anything you can buy, and the total cost was less than your previous licensing, and you never had to deal with a serial number or license manager or account rep, never had to care one bit about counting cpu cores or client seats or vms or physical hosts or ips or backup copies or spinning up new dev boxes or more production without warning or any of that bs.
The bigger you are, the less you need the convenience of outsourcing, not more.
Quite often the bigger you are the more the higher ups want risk to be mitigated, and so are often glad to cut a cheque to be able to yell at someone over the phone.
Buy declining companies with good customer bases, cut spending and raise prices.
From this page: https://archive.org/details/vddk_20260825