VMware
Best Free Hypervisors in 2024
Best Free Hypervisors in 2024
#Free #Hypervisors
“VirtualizationHowto”
As we deal with the death of the VMware ESXi free edition, in this video we look at the best free hypervisor solutions now that VMware ESXi free edition is dead.
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Common really? What type of sysadmin that you never heard about dd!!!
Really Export Utility WTF?
Put the balls on the table and do the math or do we expect to have a proprietary disk image?
Just boot a virtual pen-drive and dd to it a disk image oh the base system and emulate the hardware however you want.
That simple.
My homelab previously ran on ESXi. After VMware pulled the free license, I took a look at alternatives solutions before quickly realizing that I couldn't find one that I'm fully content with.
Proxmox VE still uses xtables-legacy as its firewall backend, which I see as a major source of concern. Both Debian and Ubuntu have moved on to the newer and technically superior nftables, thus the Proxmox team made a deliberate decision to stay on the legacy backend.
Moreover, Proxmox VE uses its own framework instead of the more widely adopted libvirt. Why would I go through all that trouble migrating off of ESXi just to lock myself in with a different vendor?
XCP-ng has its own set of problems. Namely the fact that its dom0 is painfully out of date (based on CentOS 7, decade old and now EoL).
And the Xen hypervisor that underlies XCP-ng is on its way out. AWS is the only major cloud provider that uses Xen, and even they are adopting KVM for their new offerings.
Harvester I took a look at briefly, but find it quite unintuitive (I have no Kubernetes background).
In the end I just went with plain Enterprise Linux with libvirt and openvswitch. Cockpit and virt-manager for management. It took me quite a while with the command line to set up, but it's a great learning experience and I get an excellent virtualization platform with no hard vendor lock in. (All major components exist on other Linux distros. If anything happens to free Enterprise Linux, everything can be moved over to Fedora/OpenSUSE/Debian)
Any alternative hypervisor that does not have immutable backup repo facility for it makes it a non-starter for all of my customers. Some have stated that you can just use ZFS snapshots for immutability. While the snapshot data is immutable, the snapshot itself is not. An attacker just needs to gain admin access to the storage management interface and then they can do whatever they want with those snapshots.
At this time, I have found no statement about immutability with Proxmox Backup Server. XCP-ng has a pre-release version of their backup component, that’s part of XOA, which adds immutability.
In the end, with ransomware attacks going out everywhere these days, any hypervisor that I recommend to any of my customers must be supported by backup products that include immutability. Most of those customers would also balk at the idea of going a step backwards and using agent-based backups as well. So, that’s something else to consider. CBT ability in the alternative hypervisor is a must (although, I haven’t found any yet that are being considered that do not have that capability these days.)
Nutanix AHV is using KVM as virualisation just like Proxmox. That should be mentioned, I think..
Consider ganeti. I've been using it in dev/stg and production for a decade and it's been fantastic.
I could comment on just about everything on this video being a really early homelab and production virtual environment. Suffice it to say, virtualization came out of open source. My first try was Xenand KVM. Didn't go that route right away because windows machines didn't work. ESX (without the i) did support windows vms. It was running on RedHat. I kept with ESX then VMware GSX and so for work at the same time kept my home lab also up to speed on Linux KVM. Finally abandoned windows and VMware. So glad I did. I'm about to clear a server for xcp-ng. It appears more scalable than proxmox. KVM is really, really nice. The only reason I'm considering moving is KVM is mostly maintained by RedHat, and I'm not fully confident in what they shown to be after IBM purchased them.
How about hyperV?
Where is OpenStack?
vmware solutions will not die for sure. Just give it time, wait and see. All will be bundled into VCF package that for the moment is not suited for home lab usage. However, a VMUG Advantage membership gives you all the needed licenses. That was probably one of the reasons Broadcom stopped ESXi free – to redirect more serious users to VMUG instead. With that said, this disruption in the virtualization market is in the long run good for us all and the linux and opensource market. Opening up oportunities for a lot of companies like Nutanix, IBM – Red Hat, Suse, Canonical, Proxmox, Oracle, XCP-NG, Scale Computing. Good things will happen!
5:00 no you don't have to do all these steps to migrate from VMware to Proxmox. You only need to have access to the vmdks directly and you can then import them. The conversion will be done automatically for you in that process. Another great option if you use zfs is exporting the storage via NFS and doing a storage live migration to it. Then the cutover will be quick as you only have to import the disk. Be sure to save the MAC address of the network interfaces tho
What Do you think about Ubuntu LXD?
All these companies keep doing rug pulls… Makes me think that KVM is the only trustworthy solution.
excellent video, thanks for the overview and the specific insights.
There is backup solution from Nakivo for Proxmox(proxmox-backup)
other than proxmox, can these other hypervisors support pci passthrough? and support cisco phones? also I have vmware 7/8 free software that I have not setup, If I try to activate will they work? Thanks
A year ago, I made the decision to avoid using products developed by companies like VMware, Ubuntu, or Red Hat in my production environment. Instead, I opted for community-driven software solutions. Currently, I rely on Debian for my main servers infrastructure and use KVM along with the Cockpit project for virtual machine management. Although Cockpit was initially developed by Red Hat, it primarily serves as a management interface and isn't essential to my operations.
It's very strange that you omitted Openstack, the only OSS yet production ready solution for virtualization both in the cloud and on premise.
Why choose just one? Do like I did, set up one of each and figure out which one you like the best.
Folks are upset with VMware and looking for alternatives. YET, still considering proprietary, non-open source options. Those who don't learn from history… I use Proxmox and it is excellent.
Nutanix is garbage. I’ve run it supporting 18 nodes and 2000+ VMs. It is overly complicated and updating it is an absolute nightmare. Support’s default answer to any problem is to upgrade but will not check the compatibility matrix for all of the numerous software components. Leaving you with an unstable system that will take them days to figure out has version incompatibilities.
Nutanix CE look more like a demo… "You must upgrade within 30 calendar days when an upgrade is available, else access to your cluster will be blocked."
Rancher-Harvester is modern hyperconverged infrastructure solution for both VM + Container
if some is running 100 VMs in a lab, then getting the VMUG advantage for ~$200 might be interesting. That is cheaper than the old Microsoft TechNet bundle from years ago.
timestamps in dida are wrong… and why you didn't even mention microsoft hyper-v? it's bare metal (yes, you can avoid windows and install it on any x86 hw), completely free, very good, has tons of enterprise features… ok, for clustering you need active directory, but it's an other option…
who cares?
I still need to build a lab. I focus on EUC side with horizon but really need to dig into vsphere alternatives.
I like Harvester a lot but wow is it a big learning curve… I am leaning towards xcp-ng for production work loads and smallest learning curve
we just got a quote for nutanix to replace vsphere enterprise plus… and it was less than a 10% savings over the new vmware pricing… and then all the SAs need to learn something totally new… No thank you… Nutanix has changed their pricing and is taking advantage of this craziness
Thank you for mentioning Nutanix. I didn't realize there was a free edition.
I think the timestamps in the description are wrong btw.