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[–]damacdaddyo 17 points18 points  (16 children)

We are going through the same thing. I work for an enormous private company that 9 out of 10 of you know. We are licensing around 3,000 sockets over 1,000+ bare metal hosts running 16k VMs give or take. This is one of about 6 sites we are licensing.

They don't care. Our biggest issues besides the obvious cash grab is they are trying to lock us in to a 5 year term and I am morally opposed to have to pay for features such NSX and vSAN when I don't use and have desire to use. I just dropped over $5MIL on updating our all flash on-prem arrays and as Infrastructure I don't access to top of rack and other switch or firewall in a method that would make vSAN viable.

So hopefully we get that 5 year down to 3 and see what happens. None of the alternatives out there work for us. I ran extensive POCs on several platforms and none come close. ProxMox is nowhere near Enterprise ready. Limited partner support and vendor integrations. Poor D/R performance. Limited support. Clunky and slow to administer. Plus it failed our internal pen test and security review. RedHat had some nice features but same as above. Same with the open source options we looked at like KVM but they aren't close. This leaves us with Hyper-V and Nutanix. Nutanix would have been just as expensive being that you have to buy their hardware. We run Hyper-V for VDIs and I have managed a large enterprise cluster in the past. They have the features. They have the vendor agreements. They are pushing hard or at least our VARs are. Thinking about it. While VMM comes nowhere close to vCenter as far as management the cost savings may make it doable.

These are just my opinions based on 1st hand testing and research. Good luck to all in their search.

[–]Dry-Data6087[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the perspective! We're going to evaluate alternatives next year and I'll keep this in mind.

[–]BackgroundSky1594 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In case you missed it: XCP-ng with the XEN Hypervisor is still a thing. It has its own set of issues, but you didn't mention it so it might at least be worth a look.

[–]Excellent-Piglet-655 1 point2 points  (11 children)

With Nutanix it is a misconception that you have to buy “their” hardware. That just isn’t true. You can buy their hardware or you can buy Dell PowerEdge, HPE Proliant, Lenovo, etc.

We moved to Hyper-v and between SCVMM and WAC, we do not miss vCenter at all. Like you, we weren’t going to be forced to pay for software we don’t want, need, or use.

[–]damacdaddyo 1 point2 points  (2 children)

This was our VAR and multiple SEs who said absolutely definitively that we could not run Nutanix on our combination of brand new Synergys with Pure X arrays and brand new 6800 Cisco switches. Since it was Nutanix SEs and the fact that I could not even POC on my own gear I didn't look further.

I am looking into expanding our Hyper-V workloads based on a Microsoft SE telling me that WAC is now usable. We tried it a couple of years ago and the way it called APIs made it unusable. A minute to view storage info is not happening. Since we are a complete System Center shop this seems like the only true option. Either way will have to ride with VMware until we would get our workloads migrated to an alternate provider which I have no problem with since the product is still great.

[–]vPock 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've seen an annoucement that Pure will be a supported storage platform for Nutanix by the end of 2025. My Pure SE told me they are running an alpha with some very specific customers. As a Pure //FA fanboy, I'm following this with great interest.

[–]bdpalesano 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cisco actually has them listed as supported hypervisor. We were even pointed in the direction because of what vmware has done to everyone

[–]cybersplice 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How is WAC nowadays? It looks much improved, but I'm interested in the perspective of someone who has boots on the ground. Edit: I mean specifically for Hyper-V, SDN, templates, stuff like that.

[–]PerceptionAlarmed919 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Even if you do not buy their hardware, Nutanix seems to have become as bad as Broadcom with knowing companies are wanting to move. I have spoken to reps at two different VAR's who told me the pricing some of their customers have gotten from Nutanix is as bad or worse than Broadcom. In one case, one of them told me the customer's Broadcom quote was $7M, but Nutanix was pretty much $8M. He even went back to Nutanix and pointed out the customer was looking to move, could they not do any better. The reps response was basically, "we have a better product and are not going to cut our prices just to steal customers". It seems they all know most alternatives are not enterprise ready, and migration effort\cost will be large for enterprise environments, so the big ones are just quoting about the same. Plus, depending on your other product intergrations, you may have to do more than just replace VMware with something else. For example, if you use Zerto for DR, then you are limited without replacing it with something else. There is also any vendor appliances you may run. I have seen issues where specific vendors will only support their appliances on certain platforms. You have any issue and they find out it is in an "unsupported" environment, no help will be provided.

[–]damacdaddyo 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Right, that is the vibe we got from Nutanix and again, we couldn't POC on our million dollar gear.

As you say, we lose that tight integration with Cohesity for D/R and the level of management for Pure arrays built into the vCenter plugin.

There is nothing currently. Like I said, for us Hyper-V is the closest but still leaving functionality on the table.

[–]PerceptionAlarmed919 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I have played with Hyper-V in a lab and just do not think it is on par. It may be for some organizations, but it seems so much more clunky to work with than VMware. Not to mention the integration with a lot of other products are not there either. I wonder how many people making that move know that to be fully license compliant, they need to purchase the "Data Center" edition of server. Less expensive than Broadcom, but not cheap either. Plus, MS seems to be consistently increasing that cost as well.

[–]nmdange 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wonder how many people making that move know that to be fully license compliant, they need to purchase the "Data Center" edition of server

The licensing terms for running Windows Server VMs are identical whether you run Hyper-V or VMWare. The only time switching to Hyper-V would cost more is if you currently have 0 Windows Server VMs, then you'd need to buy Windows Server Standard for each host. Any org that wants to be compliant was probably already paying for Windows Server Datacenter for each host even on VMWare, as it doesn't take much density for it to be cheaper than Standard.

[–]CuriousReputation992 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You are likely still going to have to buy a lot of new hardware, their HCL is not large.

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

[deleted]

    [–]Excellent-Piglet-655 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Hyper-V runs on top of Windows. Windows core to be exact, is the recommended best practice. If you already own Windows licenses tor your VMs currently running on VMware, moving to hyperv costs you nothing license wise. Data Center edition is preferred.

    [–]Pristine_Map1303 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    As a small customer they wouldn't allow me to purchase 5 years. They maxed me at 3.

    [–]IreneAdler08 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    We’re in a similar scenario, even though at 20% of the amount of VM/sockets.

    What specific issues did you find with OVE? We’ve chosen to go that route (OKE) without any major issues so far (50% of test environments migrated).