[PVE-User] On VMware vSphere

[Adam Thompson]

I've used both quite a bit, in production environments.

At least once a month, I wish I had chosen VMware instead of PVE.  Then I look at the price in paying, remember that I'm *NOT* selling my first-born child, left arm, both testicles _and_ had to pledge my eternal soul just to run PVE, and I relax again.

The lock issues in HA are fairly painful, I often have to kill KVM processes and manually fix the service state to regain control of a VM.  The issue doesn't affect the VM until you need to shut it down or migrate it.
Doing a rolling upgrade across your cluster is decidedly non-trivial; this is much more easily accomplished with vSphere.
Mgmt tools are comparable; Flash is not required (yay!).  API is easier to use than VMware's.
You will need a separate NFS server to hold ISO images and backups.
You can use on-node storage across the entire cluster via integrated CEPH, so no dedicated SAN is required for VM storage - comparable to vSAN. (Performance is acceptable, but definitely not great.)
Because there's an entire Debian distro under the hood, there's a much larger attack surface, but recent improvements in the firewall let you manage that to a large extent.
PVE documentation is almost nonexistent compared to VMware, and what does exist is of far lower quality - this is really the big deal, where "you get what you pay for" with VMware.
PVE support is very different - forum/community first, dedicated tech support only if you want to pay the extra money.  I'm not sure if this is good or bad.

If I had unlimited budget, I would still pick VMware.  If I were in bed with a major vendor (Microsoft, Red Hat, Oracle), I'd use their system.

Otherwise, PVE seems to be the best choice overall.  Other products might scale better (RHVM) or have slightly less overhead (Xen) but are unbalanced in some other way.

You can probably run PVE without significant worries, and save a lot of money by doing so.

That's my $0.02, but YMMV.
-Adam

On October 2, 2014 9:37:00 AM CDT, j at no-io.net wrote:
>The company that I work for current environment is VMware vSphere;
>without going on a rant about vSphere, the tldr is that it's just bad.
>
>For those people who have extensive experience with vSphere in
>production and Proxmox VE in production have you ran into any weird
>issues? I've setup PVE and it seems to work real good (so good that
>it's almost like it's too good to be true).
>
>I've only had one or two issues using it; I kept getting errors when
>trying to shutdown a VM that PVE could not get a lock for the VM. Other
>than that, is there anything major with the HA? What about old
>snaphots? In VMware if you leave a snapshot and delete it the entire VM
>will slow down to a crawl depending on how large the snapshot is.
>
>Lastly, is there documentation outside of the wiki? I purchased the
>Mastering Proxmox book (which is good); but I just feel that I'm
>missing some documentation somewhere.
>
> Thanks
>
>
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