The Virtualization Debate: XCP-NG vs Proxmox for Businesses Leaving VMware

29 thoughts on “The Virtualization Debate: XCP-NG vs Proxmox for Businesses Leaving VMware”

• No love for OpenStack?

• Hi lawrence, thank you for your videos on this. One question i have is about online expanding disks on XCP. Is this possible? Or do you need the new storage driver? Thanks!

• Personally I don't consider Proxmox to be a viable alternative to large scale vsphere, its just not there yet. Nutanix HCI is, but the pricing seems to target "just a bit cheaper than vmware with vsan", xcp-ng seems to be on the right path though.

• I started my "Homelab" with VMware many years ago on a HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 and switched to Proxmox two years ago – to be honest, because the GUI looked nice and a bit like VMware. Then I saw some of your XCP-NG videos and tried it out. Since then I have stayed with XCP-NG because it just runs without any problems. I really like the solid updates and the backup features. Thanks a lot for all your great recommendations.

• 0:09 My employer is doing exactly that … migrating from VMware vSphere to Microsoft HyperV…
  We have the opportunity to do a new start, and they go straight into proprietary city without learning anything…

• as a noob, Proxmox has won me over, thanks to complete downloadable guide from their website

• Does XCP-NG have something like VMWare's vSAN?

• Proxmox is bigger in SME in Europe than it probably is in North-America.

• Please do not use AI generated images in your thumbnails, we do not need AI to replace artists and art.

• I tried XCP-NG and found that some of the more advanced hardware pass through tasks required you to be extremely familiar with Linux command line. Not just basic command line, but deep dark corners of the command line.

• I've been using ProxMox in production for four years. Subscribed, and updated regularly. It has been an absolute rock star.

• Well, let's say one can't expect a full review in under 5 minutes. For example tech-dept, upgradability, future-proof are important here and totally neglected. Not one of Tom's best videos to say the least.

• How do you use something like vSAN on XCP-NG, I only see something that states it is in beta.

• Proxmox is the best choice of opensource hypervisor

• I must be one of dozens of Hyper-V users out there since I get free Windows Server Datacenter keys from work

• yeah we abandon hypver v POC, we worked with MS for a year and they couldent deliver, i was in the MS office for weeks trying to get it working.

• Proxmox FTW

• We switched from hyper-v to xcp in Feb 23, and it was one long unmitigated disaster – xcp is buggy as hell to the point where I was afraid to even patch or reboot it. Backups and migrations are painfully slow (no matter what your network link speed is). I gave up on it in Nov 23 and switched to proxmox 8 (and now 8.1) and couldn't be happier – wish I had never heard of xcp.

• For me is not only for the servers is how to manage and distribute vdis. Horizon works very well. With a fast protocol….
  The problems is not only with the infrastructure. Is with other software.
  If you don't have vdis, only servers or standalone machines is far easy do the change

• Hyperv bothers me as you cant do basic snapshots/checkpoints witout sacrificing long term performance. My only solution is to do a full back up of all the vms.

• Iv tried XCP but the issue I had about two years ago was that the app I needed to run used docker, and I was running it on Windows for docker. That docker never initialized because it kept erroring that needed the nested virtualization enable, which it was.. So i gave up and moved to VMware…. (now I might have to move from that too at some point)

• Nutanix could be an option too, would love to see your thoughts in form of a dedicated video on it.

• Proxmox is easy, that's it's main selling point. Xcp-NG has the issue that if you want easy updates to XO you have to pay for it. For a larger business XCP is probably a no brainer.

• 2TiB virtual drive limitations are going to screw a lot of people who want to go over to XCP-NG. Tons of massive SQL and file servers out there on vmware. Chances are, we'll just pass the cost along to our customers, since most are just using essentials plus, anyway. In the end, you have to consider if moving to a different hypervisor is worth the capex save vs the opex increase.

• Proxmox in business, no, not going to happen. I don't know why people dis hyper-v so much, it works great without so many limitations of other hyper visors. High availability, failover clustering, live migration. Starwind vsan if you want hyperconverged. No real learning curve if you use Windows. It comes with the OS. The flexibility is huge and scales very nicely especially for small businesses with under 100 vm's. I still don't get the vmware licensing thing when I look at the functionality. I just don't see the value or killer feature.

• There seems to be a lot of wrong information out there with regard to the Hyper-V Server product.

  As much as Hyper-V Server was free to use running Windows VMs on top required licensing, you had to license Windows Server Standard or Datacenter based on the number of physical CPU cores in the host so really there wasn’t any cost savings unless you only ran Linux VMs.

  We are a VMware shop and have been for 20+ years, unfortunately moving to alternatives isn’t easy as s lot of our infrastructure workflows use VMware specific technologies that don’t really exist in other solutions.

  I’d be interested to know why you don’t think Hyper-V is a good product? In previous roles I have supported Hyper- V environments from small to large scale with 2000+ VMs and it worked well without any issues. Like anything else when configured properly It performs as well as any other hypervisor platform.

• For business it is irrelevant what they will use, specially really large ones like telcos,banks and simmilar as they usually buy servers from big vendors like hp,dell (in most of europe) and vendors like them officially supports only either vmware or redhat kvm, windows/hyper/v as they can guarantee support/upgrade/fixes new drivers and others stuff like NIC, FC cards, controllers and simmilar that will works with newer version of vmware for example. So they will go only with the vendor officially supported platforms.

  So i guess this migration from vmware it will be dependet from type of business and required certificates for compliance.

  But in case proxmox vs xcp-ng still irrelevant as both are good , as on the end in business all setups will be in HA mode with extra nodes sitting down and wait to take over if something will die, so not really need 1h response time in 99.9% of time.

  1h response time is more crucial for NAS/SAN side as this is needed for all servers/nodes/clusters.

• I have been a Linux KVM user for somwher around 25 years. I run it on debian and Ubuntu. Currently looking for an alternative. Leaning towards xcp-ng. Won't do harvester probably. Still irritated with Suse over their MS affinity

• My experience has been that while xcpng does offer a better support option, it was also a source of significantly more problems. Hyperconverged proxmox/OVS/ceph by contrast has been both more reliable and easier to work with. I also spend less time fighting with the os because it has a real package manager that lets me actually work on the platform, as opposed to the locked down "appliance" variant on xcpng's rhel knockoff.

  If you're in a situation where you direly need high level support contracts with extremely rapid turnaround, arguably you shouldn't be using either product.

Comments are closed.