this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Is the nice non-cloud open source stuff reasonable for enterprise needs? My workplace needs to host a large number of virtual machines, and historical reasons plus various regulations make it easier for us to do that in a datacenter, not on the cloud.
VMware meets our needs, and it definitely doesn't run or look like a product past its prime, so I'm interested in any of these non-cloud open source alternatives.
Eventually we may move to cloud, but we haven't been able to find any significant increase in functionality to justify the work for that move.
There are three options worth very seriously considering.
XCP-NG (formerly Xen, based on what used to be the Citrix codebase) is a mature, stable and enterprise ready platform. It comes with some costs for an enterprise level deployment, but it's definitely worth comparing against VMware as the potential savings could be substantial.
Then you have KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine), developed by Red Hat. Unlike XCP-NG, this comes at absolutely no cost, and in fact you almost certainly already have it installed, as the core technology is part of the Linux kernel. KVM is powerful, open source and free hypervisor that can absolutely handle enterprise workloads. Oracle uses it for their entire cloud platform, and Amazon still uses it for a substantial amount of AWS if I recall correctly. With that said, while the hypervisor is incredibly solid, the management tools vary a little. Basically, expect to do a lot more from the command line.
The solution to that problem is Proxmox. This is a prebuilt Linux OS based on Debian, but carefully fine tuned to support KVM with a custom web interface to handle cluster management, as well as having fantastic support for advanced storage technologies like Ceph and ZFS. Proxmox also takes full advantage of the ability to run both virtual machines and LXC containers on the same platform, giving you great lightweight solutions for deploying Linux machines. There's some cost for enterprise use, but it's very low compared to other enterprise virtualization options.
Xcp-ng gets you clustered server management with failover and is free unless you upgrade to their enterprise management tools.
Also Citrix (now CSG) still has the xenserver development group and still sells their version that xcp is based on.
I run an xcp cluster as my homelab infrastructure.
VMware is massively expensive for enterprise, but is a very typical choice for datacenters.
All good points. Thank you.
I would suggest looking at OpenStack and KVM or XEN for the hypervisor.
You also have Proxmox.
Big love for Proxmox.
Proxmox is what most resemble vmware with vcenter. Easy to install, operate and run.
Openstack is more like a self service cloud. But a lot more complex.
I'm here in the same boat. OpenStack and other options are out there, but in smaller shops it's not viable to dedicate a whole team to them.
VMware is the standard that consultants are familiar with. Support has been excellent in my experience. Integrations exist with many enterprise systems. It's a no brainer for many executives when forced to run on prem services.
Virtualbox for non-cloud.
Azure for cloud if you need Windows.