VMware for me… but really thats mainly because its what i interact with all the time. I couldn’t tell you if its the best of the bunch, but it is the one that everyone in the infrastructure and security team has experience with and honestly that brings a heavy weight to things.
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+1 for virt-manager and kvm/qemu.
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Proxmox. I do like XCP-NG’s UI better (probably should’ve been an option in the poll), and it was my first choice, but I ran into hardware support issues.
Proxmox on the other hand is pretty standard Debian underneath, meaning out-of-the-box hardware support beats the socks off of most competitors.
For commercial applications where you want “certification”, sure, whatever, you’re spending wheelbarrows of cash anyway, but for my home?
Yeah, those 10year old 40Gbase IB cards are good enough, thanks. No I won’t upgrade to your new €1000 200Gbase ones just because you no longer support the “old” stuff.
From commercial vendors I would expect ditching of support for anything that isn’t current, but seeing that behaviour in FLOSS projects always makes me a bit sad (and yes, when reporting a bug with a piece of hardware I was told it was “out of support”. That’s what you get when most kernel devs are paid by the manufacturers, I guess)
Remember that joke about buying a *nix machine for a nickel? (at the risk of dating myself, here ya go: Dilbert Comic Strip on 1995-06-24 | Dilbert by Scott Adams Oh dear, has it really been that long?) Because it often sure does feel that the enterprise-isation of the FLOSS world has made many forget how it all started.
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Thanks for more input. 
Windows Server 2016+ is just Hyper-V.
It is available on both Windows Server (there is even a no-cost version) and a Windows 10 version, which is only a little neutered.
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I used the hell out of Hyper-V (on Server 2016 or 2019) since I was lucky enough to have access to a Datacenter edition key from School. This is nice because using the Datacenter key you can spin up an unlimited amount of fully licensed Datacenter edition VMs on the host with the key installed. I really liked it, sure it’s not VMware, but I mean, I would never use some of the advanced VMware features anyways. All I needed was just a simple hypervisor and the ability to live migrate VMs, Hyper-V gave that to me.
I’ve since moved to Unraid and only play with VMs here and there since everything is on Docker for me now.
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Yup, zfs + virtualization is a memory hog. My builds typically have RAM into triple digits GB.
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I work for a small company and when we were looking for virtualization - we couldn’t stomach going with vmware. We actually looked at qemu and block transfer for high availability. It was a bit over our head. (I use virt manager and pass through video on my laptop - so I am a bit experienced.) Then I was actually watching a Wendell video where he was looking at proxmox.
Now we have 4 servers with vm’s running HA and replication. It is pretty darn awesome for what it is. It works to - we a have had the main server go down and the 2 backup servers took right over. No one even noticed. Amazing (zfs is also very cool…)…
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+1 to oVirt and +1 to ZFS (or any storage) on a separate host. With that being said, oVirt has a pretty nifty Gluster implementation if you want to go the hyperconverged route.
I personally picked oVirt specifically because its ease of use as an undercloud for OpenShift/OKD, but I run all my VMs on it and it seems to be a pretty solid platform.
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Is there a way for Unraid to use block storage (iscsi) as the primary storage backing?
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I know they added ISCSI target support, but I don’t know if you can do ISCSI initiator or not.
[Plugins] iSCSI GUI and ISCSI Target - Plugin Support - Unraid
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I too like unraid, however the moment you want to do something even slightly more advanced than what is offered you’re sh*t out of luck. I think unraid for nas with proxmox for vm’s is a good combo.
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I use virt-manager/KVM with ceph/rbd storage.
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2 hosts 1 Proxmox, one Centos 9 Stream (The Cockpit UI is awesome!!) with 5 node nested OpenStack cluster. But I am also a very big fan of oVirt as well. It’s just nice to use the Kubernetes CSI driver. It’s unfortunate that no libvirt or Proxmox CSI driver exits.
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