With free esxi over, not shocking bit sad, I am now about to move away from a virtualisation platform i’ve used for a quarter of a century.

Never having really tried the alternatives, is there anything that looks and feels like esxi out there?

I don’t have anything exceptional I host, I don’t need production quality for myself but in all seriousness what we run at home end up at work at some point so there’s that aspect too.

Thanks for your input!

    • @[email protected]
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      41 year ago

      Kubernetes yes, but minikube is kinda meh as a way to install it outside of development environments.

      There’s so many better manageable ways like RKE/Rancher (which gives you the possibility to go k3s),Kubespray or even kubeadm.

      All of those will result in a cluster that’s more suitable for running actual workloads.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      I wouldn’t recommend going K8S only in a homelab. Too much effort and some things don’t fit well (Home Assistant, Gaming VM?)

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        It’s just a suggestion. Many would probably find that the workload they host is available on containers. I run a Kubernetes cluster on bare metal at home. There’s also nothing stopping you from creating VMs that you can ssh to with KubeVirt

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        Depends on what you want to self host? Could be worth it to see if what you self host can be deployed as containers instead

  • oleorun
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    121 year ago

    I’ve used Hyper-V and in fact moved away from ESXi long ago. VMWare had amazing features but we could not justify the ever-increasing costs. Hyper-V can do just about anything VMWare can do if you know Powershell.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      I use it with WAC on my home server and it’s good enough for anything I need to do. Easy to create VMs using that UI, PS not even needed.

    • @[email protected]
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      31 year ago

      Another vote for Hyper-V. Moved to it from ESXi at home because I had to manage a LOT of Hyper-V hosted machines at work, so I figured I’d may as well get as much exposure to it as I could. Works fine for what I need.

  • CubitOom
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    51 year ago

    If you are dipping toes into containers with kvm and proxmox already, then perhaps you could jump into the deep end and look at kubernetes (k8s).

    Even though you say you don’t need production quality. It actually does a lot for you and you just need to learn a single API framework which has really great documentation.

    Personally, if I am choosing a new service to host. One of my first metrics in that decision is how well is it documented.

    You could also go the simple route and use docker to make containers. However making your own containers is optional as most services have pre built ones that you can use.

    You could even use auto scaling to run your cluster with just 1 node if you don’t need it to be highly available with a lot of 9s in uptime.

    The trickiest thing with K8s is the networking, certs and DNS but there are services you can host to take care of that for you. I use istio for networking, cert-manager for certs and external-dns for DNS.

    I would recommend trying out k8s first on a cloud provider like digital ocean or linode. Managing your own k8s control plane on bare metal has its own complications.

    • Dran
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      71 year ago

      There are also full-suites like rancher which will abstract away a lot of the complexity

    • TheWoozy
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      21 year ago

      K8s is great, but you’re chaning the subject and not answering OPs question. Containers =/= VMs.

      • CubitOom
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        11 year ago

        You are right. But proxmox and many of the other suggestions aren’t vms either.

  • /home/pineapplelover
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    71 year ago

    Qemu/virt manager. I’ve been using it and it’s so fast. I still need to get the clipboard sharing working but as of right now it’s the best hypervisor I’ve ever used.

  • @[email protected]
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    11 year ago

    Coming from a decade of vmware esxi and then a few years certified Nutanix, I was almost instantly at home clustering proxmox then added ceph across my hosts and went ‘wtf did I sell Nutanix for’. I was already running FreeNAS later truenas by then so I was already converted to hosting on Linux but seriously I was impressed.

    Business case: With what you save on licensing for Nutanix or vsan, you can place all nvme ssd and run ceph.

  • @[email protected]
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    191 year ago

    If you’re running mostly Linux vms proxmix us really good. It’s based on kvm and has a really nice feature set.

  • GeekFTW
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    41 year ago

    OOTL and someone who only uses a vm once every several years for shits & grins: What happened to vmware?

  • exu
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    81 year ago

    I’m pretty happy with XCP-ng with their XenOrchestra management interface. XenOrchestra has a free and enterprise version, but you can also compile it from source to get all the enterprise features. I’d recommend this script: https://github.com/ronivay/XenOrchestraInstallerUpdater

    I’d say it’s a slightly more advanced ESXi with vCenter and less confusing UI than Proxmox.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      I second this and would like to add in another resource for XCP-ng : Lawrence Systems on YouTube.

    • @[email protected]
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      101 year ago

      In my “testing” at work and private, PVE is miles ahead of xcp-ng n terms of performance. Sure, xcp-ng does it’s thing very stable, but everything else…proxmox is faster

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        I agree that Proxmox VE is better; I’m just saying that people should compare multiple options and pick the one they like the best.

        I’m using Unraid on my home server because it can run Docker containers in addition to KVM and LXC (via a plugin).

  • @[email protected]B
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    1 year ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    DNS Domain Name Service/System
    ESXi VMWare virtual machine hypervisor
    HA Home Assistant automation software
    ~ High Availability
    LTS Long Term Support software version
    LXC Linux Containers
    ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
    k8s Kubernetes container management package

    [Thread #540 for this sub, first seen 24th Feb 2024, 11:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    I actually moved everything to docker containers at home… Not an apples to apples, but I don’t need so many full OSs it turns out.

    At work we have a mix of things running right now to see. I don’t think we’ll land on ovirt or openstack. It seems like we’ll bite the cost bullet and move all the important services to amazon.