I personally take a very dim view of Broadcom buying VMWare as a previous customer of Symantec. I am a sysadmin for a K12 school district that has been using ESXi and VSphere from at least v. 5.5. We are using Carbon Black as well. I am familiar with Proxmox and XCPng and while I understand they offer support, I want to be considerate of the stakeholders that will have to answer to a Superintendent and School board.
As someone who was involved with trying to migrate to Hyper-V from ESXi (licensing cost reasons - we’re an enterprise with 1.5-2b turnover)… I’m a vSphere admin since 3.5.
Do not underestimate the cost in switching.
Both in terms of money and in terms of manpower.
We’ve abandoned our plans to get off, for now.
You may take a “dim view” of VMware/Symantec as a sysadmin, but switching from VMware (or any hypervisor) to anything else is going to be a lot of headache in terms of cutting over. You will need to consider:
- VM conversion - either downtime to convert, or cut over to new VMs
- licensing changes - dealing with two companies during a transition period
- possibly changes in storage topology / filesystem format
- changes to backup solution. does your backup vendor support the new platform? can you restore last year’s vSphere VMDK backups into the new platform (if you do them)?
- re-validating compatibility with all your stuff (e.g., will your server application vendor support your hypervisor? yes this will matter if you run into application performance issues!)
- management tool-chain changes - any staff you have will need to re-learn both the tools and performance quirks of the new platform in order to diagnose the inevitable teething issues. what about Bob’s PowerCLI script he runs against the vSphere host to automate job X?
- space/power/cooling requirement to run both the old and new platforms in parallel during a cut-over period.
- plenty of other stuff not even mentioned above
Unless you’re an extremely small/trivial size deployment… the above will be months and months of research, testing and out of hours work.
My advice as someone who has tried to get off vSphere is this:
Unless there’s a real, significant financial reason to do so, don’t even go there.
And if you do go there, take a proper, long, hard look at all the touch points that any change will impact. Like… seriously. Likely the expected cost savings will pale into insignificance vs. the changeover cost.
And all this risk, cost, etc. for what? You don’t like Symantec? That’s an expensive grudge to hold - and in terms of risk, cost, etc. vs. payoff… where’s the payout? Saving on vmware licensing? It will be easily eaten for several years due to the costs to cover the above points.
And you’ve taken something that is likely currently working just fine… if anything goes sideways during this, the person who instigated/project managed it (i.e., you?) will cop the shit for it.
In the meantime, can pretty much guarantee there are more important things you could be spending your time on. Security audits/compliance, upgrading other things, etc.
There’s no shortage of things to do. Don’t go looking for busy work that doesn’t need to exist.
/2c.
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Even though I don’t use VMware in a work environment, I understand your concerns about Broadcom as I’ve seen a few Infosec folks on Twitter outright hint it might be a time to brace for some workplaces that may consider switching. As everyone had seen from past potential buyouts in the tech industry, there is a possibility it’ll fall apart vs being a done deal. Worst case is Broadcom manages VMware poorly enough to the point they’re stuck spinning it off as its own company.
I’d agree with thro, in some work environments it can cost months(or worse year(s)) of time to switch and also replace solution(s) that were originally part of a VMware product or 3rd party solution. Some workplaces who may need to run VMware until a certain cutoff could end up having delays which add up to further costs such as maintaining “older” servers.
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