It will be interesting to see what they do with Proxmox as that is one, I keep hearing about.  We are good here with VMware but for the many struggling on next steps due to the Broadcom acquisition.

I’m trying to determine what makes the most sense.  Larger enterprises are very invested in VMware and won’t transition quickly, if at all.  Medium-sized businesses - I’m not sure.  Pricing gets more expensive, but seems to be doable, at least early on for the next year or two.  Small businesses….the VMware tax is kinda high with the Essentials kit’s being retired, but Standard isn’t SUPER expensive.  But having to pay that subscription year over year over year is expensive.  For my clients on Essentials kits, I think we’re talking around $800 initially and then around $100 for a 1-year renewal.  That’s feasible to cover 3 hosts.  But make that $1000 or more every year?  That’s costly for some…..and would certainly make alternatives like Proxmox (or Hyper-V) a much more appealing alternative assuming that all other features are equal, or at least something that can be lived with (or without).

I need to rebuild my lab environment, and I’m really considering setting up some hosts with ProxMox or XCP-NG or both, but I did recently get the idea to see if I can nest those environments inside of ESXI instead because ESXI isn’t going away, at least not quickly (but probably not at all).

I'm going to begin playing around with XCP for starters. Proxmox having VM corruption issues, it appears, not sure it's a viable near-term solution. 

XCP-NG started as a XenServer fork, but looks pretty for sure.

Proxmox looks to be KVM based (as is Nutanix AHV, Redhat Virtualization, Oracle KVM), etc.

I hope that means an easier time for Veeam to support Proxmox as they already built that kind of integration with AHV and Redhat. That said, I’m not a Veeam dev, so I can’t speak to the difficulty of integration. Also, if you are looking at Proxmox seriously, you should definitely take it for a test drive, especially around backups.

As for XCP-NG - that’s probably more difficult as I don’t think XenServer and KVM share much - but I could be wrong of course.

VMware has been so dominant for so long because its a great product. Unfortunately that hasn’t left much room for any other vendor to gain market share (VMware has 84% with the next closest competitor - HyperV having only 4%). That’s essentially stifled the competition, and it shows. 

Really depends on what you’re trying to achieve with your deployments and ultimately what deals you can get to lower the sticker price that Broadcom quotes. I can’t see vSphere going away anytime soon, but the sticker shock may be enough to drive a few organizations away.

It’ll be a long time before any of these other products are tested and trusted for production in enterprise solution. Unfortunately VMware have such a grip, there is not a lot of options, not would I want to switch overnight. Especially for someone like us using SRM and other VMware products.

This may be the push to go full Veeam replication at our site though :) 

We’re currently moving from Hyper-V & Veeam to Proxmox.

A Proxmox-Veeam solution would be great for us.

As we’ll use Proxmox in a testing environment for the next 6 months, we could beta-test Proxmox & Veeam.

I know Veeam is investigating Proxmox and if you get to test things eventually hopefully it works out.  Looking forward to seeing this move forward with Veeam.

Hi @foolonthehill - there is a post on the Forum I recommend following along to keep on eye on Proxmox support. Any feedback you can provide the PMs would be beneficial as well.

https://forums.veeam.com/ovirt-kvm-f62/feature-request-proxmox-t71691-150.html#p516187