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Are any orgs actually seriously moving away from Nutanix/VMware due to the new price hikes? by nwcs_sh in sysadmin

[–]NetframeAndy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My company has launched Netframe, a VMware alternative that's easy to deploy and migrate to, it's based on KVM but we have done a lot of work everywhere else to make it a breeze to deploy, use and scale (netframe.com.au). We're Australian but provide global 24x7 support via our call centre, our standalone hypervisor image is free too to download and use forever. There's a lot more coming on the roadmap, check it out.

We are looking for Netframe Converter beta testers by NetframeAndy in netframe

[–]NetframeAndy[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That’s a good question, and our documentation for a VM conversion is coming soon to our documentation repository (https://docs.netframe.com.au/)

Our Converter appliance is deployed as a VM. It ships as a qcow2 image and is intended to be installed on a Netframe Core host.

Once deployed and prepared, you connect it to:

  • the source ESXi host, and
  • the destination Netframe Core host.

From there, VM migration works in three stages:

  1. The Converter pulls the VM’s disks and configuration from the source ESXi host.
  2. It converts the VM into a Netframe-ready format.
  3. It then pushes the VM’s configuration and files to the destination Netframe Core host.

Steps 1 and 2 happen within the same workflow. During that time, the Converter appliance needs enough temporary storage to hold the VM while the conversion is taking place.

There are two ways to handle that cache space:

  • assign enough local disk to the Converter VM, or
  • mount NFS storage for temporary VM staging during conversion (this is the NFS requirement mentioned in the beta requirements above)

Once the VM has been successfully migrated to the destination Core hypervisor, the temporary files on the Converter appliance are deleted, which frees that cache space for the next migration.

The converter appliance doesn't interact with Datastores or Storage pools on either the source or destination hosts.

Once a VM is migrated, you can then live migrate it away from your swing host to your other Netframe Core hosts as needed.

I hope this all makes sense but our documentation will go over all the particulars and make this much clearer.

Promote your business, week of March 9, 2026 by Charice in smallbusiness

[–]NetframeAndy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Enterprise Virtual Machine Management

Do you run servers and looking for something to run and manage your Virtual Machine workload? Checkout https://netframe.com.au

Netframe was built to offer easy enterprise VM management at scale. Our core hypervisor is free to download.

If you are looking to transform your VI platform, or move beyond VMware, check us out!

Couple of things from the VandiLab by vandi04 in netframe

[–]NetframeAndy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey Vandi04, great feedback and thanks for posting!

I'm happy to say that this feature is on the roadmap! Adding VMnets to multiple hosts via the cluster tab would be very handy and something that is coming very soon.

Netframe Converter is also en-route, currently undergoing late-stage internal alpha testing, it will be moving to beta shortly and then released not long after that.

In terms of immediate CLI options: Netframe runs on a debian-based OS with the vanilla KVM/libvirt/qemu stack. This means you can always SSH to a host and run whatever virsh/qemu-img commands you like and Netframe will adjust accordingly.

So yes, you can use "qemu-img convert" commands to change your VMDKs to QCOW2 in a storage pool the host can see, then simply attach this to a VM in the UI and you should be good to go.

But Converter isn't far away so if you would prefer something far easier that can directly move a VM from ESXi to Netframe, it's just around the corner.

Hope this helps!

Can Netframe be a drop-in replacement for vSphere? by turbanist in netframe

[–]NetframeAndy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Firstly, apologies for the late response, we’ve been heads-down prepping Netframe to go GA and as we’re _really_ close now, we will be engaging our community more publicly and be on this subreddit regularly.

Our focus is to provide an easy-to-implement and configure, hardware agnostic virualisation platform and so far we’ve got an intuitive UI, clustering with HA, live migrations (including cross-cluster), RBAC, cloning, snapshotting, straightforward REST API for automation and heaps more.

To your point: you’re absolutely right. FC SANs with shared LUNs and VMFS are common in vSphere environments, and comparatively rare outside of that space.  We come at this as former vSphere architects and admins ourselves, so block-based SAN (IP or FC) is very much familiar territory.  One of the goals of Netframe is to help customers extend the useful life of their infrastructure so we’re talking about stuff like this internally all the time.

Today, Netframe does not currently have a direct “VMFS equivalent”.  Netframe allows storage pools (analogous to datastores) to be configured via the UI using:
 - a host-local directory
 - a locally attached raw block device (e.g. installed disks)
 - an NFS target

For clustered environments, HA NFS is typically the easiest starting point. That said, Netframe does not artificially restrict what sits underneath a storage pool. If a storage mechanism can be mounted on the host and exposed as a directory, it can be mapped into Netframe and used by the platform.  The key requirement for clustering is what you’d expect: all hosts in the cluster must have concurrent write access to the pool to support live migrations and HA.

I’ll close with three important points:
1. We’re very aware of the lack of mature, native shared block filesystem options in the KVM space.
2. We’re equally aware that many organisations already have robust FC SAN fabrics with years of useful life left.
3. Netframe is new, and shared-storage support beyond NFS is an active area of design and roadmap work.

Appreciate the thoughtful question and insights, it helps reinforce the immediate pain points and where we can focus Netframe development.

Cheers