The list for those that don’t want to read the whole article:
- Proxmox
- XCP-ng
- OpenNebula
- SUSE Harvester
- Oracle VM VirtualBox
I like Virtualbox, use it myself in several instances but I would never consider it a replacement for VMware.
Virtualbox is painfully non-performant compared to anything KVM based.
I use VirtualBox right now. My daily driver windows 10 guest is so slow, that pushing the start button comes with a 20s wait. Looking at the performance monitor while this is happening, nothing pops outs as the culprit. Plenty of resources left.
I’ve always sworn to VirtualBox, but I’m going to ask my boss for a workstation pro license next time I see him.
Thanks, but… Wow, who would’ve thought it’s the other major contenders.
Thanks
Not even an honorable mention for QEMU?
The weird thing to me about the majority of VMware environments I see is that they exist to prop up and extend Microsoft environments.
Microsoft is hostile towards this use case because having your own cloud competes with their cloud products.
VMware was a commodity product that exists because they know how desperately IT professionals need to keep these Windows systems running with some level of reliability with advanced backup and replication strategies. And it was good.
After trying out proxmox I can say that:
- VM performance under windows is much faster on vmware. I think this boils down to the drivers for storage. I could go more into detail but not here.
- Containers and Linux VMs are offering me more than I ever really hoped for in proxmox.
But now I’m starting to think what the alternatives are really. VMware was a windows first virtualization platform. Other virtualization platforms in the open source ecosystem really put things like Linux first. Having to race to get to the point of hosting windows systems with constantly increasing licensing prices has really diminished the value to me of virtualization over all for windows.
I think we as a community need to move away from windows on the server and embrace technologies like containers,docker,podman, Kubernetes and phase out reliance on Windows.
For starters, does anybody have a rock solid setup guide for a Kubernetes Active Directory System?
Active directory doesn’t normally go with Kubernetes. What are you asking?
Yeeahh… I’m thinking (hoping) he means an alternative LDAP/IDP, like Keycloak or Authentik…? Wanting to reduce reliance on Windows = kicking AD to the curb, too.
There is Samba AD but that will very much not run in kubernetes
Now what about EUC replacements. That’s the more sticky situation.
For those who don’t know, EUC stands for end user computing.
Why is so hard to setup VMs for employees? Maybe I’m missing something but it seems like a matter of just creating a virtual machine with a GPU attached.
In our case we have over 1500 employees using it, but only about 500 at a time. It’s an extreme waste of resources to have to provision 3x the hardware rather than use ephemeral systems. Also it’s much easier to patch a “gold” image and recompose entire pools than have to manage all of the systems as if they were full on laptops. Just to name a couple things off the top of my head.
Thin clients?
Yup. That’s another reason we don’t have individual systems. And most thin clients aren’t designed to connect 1:1 to a VM. They usually need a broker of some sort.
Thanks for the explanation
Very significantly different performance requirements. The client communication needs tuning for fast UI response. Unified comms (zoom, teams, etc) need to be redirected to avoid bottlenecking through the server. usage patterns aren’t very well distributed (everyone logs in at 8) which means you can’t over subscribe as much.
It’s very different than a server workload.
Source: I run 80k of these.
Proxmox is amazing
For some cases, yes. I don’t think its mature in many ways and the company is small and very local.
I love it for my homelab, but I’m not sure about production.
