Goodbye VMWare, Hello Proxmox

Goodbye VMWare, Hello Proxmox

I have been running with VMWare for the last 8 years and up until a couple of days ago I thought I would take another look around the virtualization software again to see what else there might be out there.

Looking around I eventually came across `Proxmox`. Not only is it lighter on the host, but it seems to be a hell of a lot snappier as well. Not only that, but it gave me the ability to go back to my linux roots and have something that I could access the shell and use ansible again. YAY!

So once I did some testing to see if it could actually be a replacement for me I started converting my PROD environment over to Proxmox.

Downfall to Proxmox is that I would not be able to use HA or DRS in my cluster environment to essentially load balance my VMs. However, because I have the ability to use `Ansible` and also use the api to read/ control Proxmox I believe there should be a way to do a bit of a DIY DRS..

Converting VMWare to Proxmox

This was easy to do, but it took time. Basically you jump onto your Proxmox host or the *injest vmware* server and bring in the `OVF` template onto local or attached storage.
Once its accessible, then your able to convert it to a format Proxmox can read. Once converted start your VM up and off you go.

Now not only did I do this for about 40 VMs but nothing failed either. When I have used VMWare in the past, I always have something fail, or not write properly or have the stupid lock file errors. Proxmox was just a breeze and quickly offloaded all VMs off without a hitch!

Overall Opinion of Proxmox

Proxmox is much quicker in its interface than VMWare is. It has a much lighter foot print over each host and there is no VCSA to host. As well as the 10GB+ of memory it would chew just having it sit around.

Proxmox also has the ability of creating a cluster and having an accessible web ui of each host accessible from any host you connect too (think of it like a seperate vcsa setup on each host which is linked and can communicate to each esxi host in the cluster).

Proxmox also takes into account the ability of creating containers. Similar to the concept of a Docker container, but a more lightweight varient more in line with the root linux structures.

Round up

Overall I have been very pleased with Proxmox. As of the date writing this, I have now been running it since the start of this year without any issues or faults.
It has been running 24/7 and has not showed any signs of slowing down. It's very lightweight and efficient of the host resources it has access to.