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!

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    5·
    8 months ago

    Ooh, didn’t know libvirt supported clusters and live migrations…

    I’ve just setup Proxmox, but as it’s Debian based and I run Arch everywhere else, then maybe I could try that… thanks!

    • vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      8 months ago

      In my experience and for my mostly basic needs, major differences between libvirt and proxmox:

      • The “clustering” in libvirt is very limited (no HA, automatic fencing, ceph inegration, etc. at least out-of-the box), I basically use it to 1. admin multiple libvirt hypervisors from a single libvirt/virt-manager instance 2. migrate VMs between instances (they need to be using shared storage for disks, etc), but it covers 90% of my use cases.
      • On proxmox hosts I let proxmox manage the firewall, on libvirt hosts I manage it through firewalld like any other server (+ libvirt/qemu hooks for port forwarding).
      • On proxmox I use the built-in template feature to provision new VMs from a template, on libvirt I do a mix of virt-clone and virt-sysprep.
      • On libvirt I use virt-install and a Debian preseed.cfg to provision new templates, on proxmox I do it… well… manually. But both support cloud-init based provisioning so I might standardize to that in the future (and ditch templates)
      • mlaga97@lemmy.mlaga97.spaceEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        they need to be using shared storage for disks

        You can perform a live migration without shared storage with libvirt

          • mlaga97@lemmy.mlaga97.spaceEnglish
            1·
            8 months ago

            Pretty darn well. I actually needed to do some maintenance on the server earlier today so I just migrated all of the VMs over to my desktop, did the server maintenance, and then moved the VMs back over to the server, all while live and functioning. Running ping in the background looks like it missed a handful of pings as the switches figured their life out and then was right back where they were; not even long enough for uptime-kuma to notice.