[HN Gopher] Proxmox VE: Import Wizard for Migrating VMware ESXi VMs
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Proxmox VE: Import Wizard for Migrating VMware ESXi VMs
Author : aaronius
Score : 157 points
Date : 2024-03-27 16:33 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (forum.proxmox.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (forum.proxmox.com)
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| Very swift move by Proxmox. For context, VMware recently
| increased their prices as much as 1200% for some customers.
| rwmj wrote:
| Tons of products like this have existed for years. Virt-v2v
| (which I wrote) since 2007/8, Platespin, Xen XCP, AWS's
| tooling, Azure Migrate etc.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| Yes, that's true. But this is not about the product but about
| business practices of Broadcom. They tend to do sharp price
| increases when they purchase a product line.
|
| ServeTheHome talked about this a while ago.
| https://youtu.be/peH4ic7g5yc
| whalesalad wrote:
| I did this recently and it was honestly a walk in the park. Was
| quite pleasantly surprised when all my vm's just booted up and
| resumed work as normal. The only thing I was worried about was
| the mac addresses used for dedicated dhcp leases, but all of that
| "just worked" too!
| Denote6737 wrote:
| Proxmox striking whilst the iron is still hot. Impressive.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| Important because VMWare's been acquired by Broadcom (November
| 22, 2023) and Broadcom's been turning the screws on customers to
| get more money. Many folks are looking for alternatives. More
| context:
|
| 2024/02/26 Can confirm a current Broadcom VMware customer went
| from $8M renewal to $100M
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39509506
|
| 2024/02/13 VMware vSphere ESXi free edition is dead
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39359534
|
| 2024/01/18 VMware End of Availability of perpetual licensing and
| associated products https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39048120
|
| 2024/01/15 Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom
| takeover https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38998615
|
| 2023/12/12 VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of
| perpetual license https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38615315
| blaerk wrote:
| I really hope the crazy prize increase of vmware products will
| end the use of esxi and the rest of the vsphere suite, it is one
| of the worst applications and apis i have ever had the
| displeasure of working with!
| candiddevmike wrote:
| VMware has a track record of pretty great reliability across a
| _vast_ array of hardware. Yes, the APIs suck, but they 're a
| case study on tech debt: vSphere is basically the Windows
| equivalent of datacenter APIs. They chose the best technology
| at the time (2009, which meant SOAP, Powershell, XML, etc) and
| had too much inertia to rework it.
| mianos wrote:
| Not to mention how flakey it is at scale. There is always
| some vmware guy who replies to me saying how good it is, but
| if you have thousands of VMs it is a random crapshoot.
| Something you just don't see with say AWS and Azure at
| similar scale. It reaks of old age and hack on hack over many
| years, and that is saying something when compared to AWS.
| zettabomb wrote:
| I can't concur. VMware was the leader in virtualization
| technology for a long time, and honestly nothing is quite as
| simple to start with as ESXi if you've never used a type 1
| hypervisor before. I'm not so familiar with the APIs, so
| perhaps you're correct in that sense.
| nolok wrote:
| > nothing is quite as simple to start with as ESXi if you've
| never used a type 1 hypervisor before
|
| Not sure about where ESXi is at lately on that level, but
| latest proxmox is really, really simple to start with if
| you've never used an hypervisor. You boot on the usb drive,
| press yes a few times, open the ip:port they give you and
| then you can click "create vm", next next next here is the
| iso to boot from and that's it.
|
| Any tech user who has some vague knowledge about virtual
| machine or even run virtualbox on his computer could do it,
| and the more advanced fonctions (from proper backups and
| snapshot to multi node replication and load balancing) are
| absurdly simple to figure out in the UI.
|
| I can't talk about the performance or quality of one against
| the other, but in pure difficulty to approach proxmox is
| doing very very good.
| mavhc wrote:
| also does zfs raidz boot in the installer
| MrDarcy wrote:
| Also does ceph in the GUI for near instant live
| migrations.
| fh973 wrote:
| I really hope that the price increase creates a business
| opportunity for new technology. This space has been plagued by
| subpar "free" alternatives (Openstack, Kubernetes) for a
| decade.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| We went from $66 last year to $3600 this year.
|
| There won't be another year.
| kazen44 wrote:
| i would disagree with you there, especially because there is
| very little on the sdn front which matches NSX-T in terms of
| SDN capabilities, this is something in which vmware has been
| ahead, the only other people with the same capabilities seem to
| be hyperscalers.
| c0l0 wrote:
| Take a look at Proxmox SDN features:
| https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pvesdn.html (some of
| it is still in beta, I think).
|
| I think it comes _pretty_ close - close enough for probably
| most but the very largest of users, who, I think, should
| probably have tried to become hyperscalers themselves,
| instead of betting the farm and all the land around it on
| VMware (by Broadcom).
| kazen44 wrote:
| the thing it is mainly missing is multi-tenancy self
| service. (ipam integration seems very nice though).
|
| NSX allows you to create seperate clusters which hosts VM's
| which run the routing and firewalling functionality.
| oneplane wrote:
| NSX-T and what hyperscalers do is essentially orchestration
| of things that already exist anyway. The load balancing in
| NSX is mostly just some openresty and Lua which as been
| around for quite a while. Classic Q-in-Q and bridging also
| does practically all of the classic L2 & L3 networking that
| tends to be touted as 'new', while you could even do that
| fully orchestrated when Puppet was the hot new thing back in
| the day.
|
| Some things (that were created before NSX) may have come from
| internet exchanges and hyperscalers, like openflow, P4, and
| FRR, but were really not missing parts that were required to
| do software defined networking. If anything, the only thing
| you really needed for SDN was Linux, and the only real
| distinction between SDN and non-SDN was hardwired ASICs in
| the network fabric (well, not hard-hardwired, but with
| limited programmability or 'secret' APIs).
| moondev wrote:
| By application do you mean vCenter? It's in an entirely
| different league than proxmox.
|
| https://i0.wp.com/williamlam.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
| MrDarcy wrote:
| It's not in a different league. I've used both in production.
| As others have said vSphere breaks down with thousands of
| VM's, and worse the vSwitch implementation is buggy and
| unreliable as soon as you add more than a couple to a
| cluster.
| moondev wrote:
| > the vSwitch implementation is buggy and unreliable as
| soon as you add more than a couple to a cluster.
|
| Next time try dSwitch (distributed switch) instead of
| vSwitch. It's designed for cluster use and much more
| powerful (and easier to manage across hosts). Manually
| managing vSwitches across a cluster sounds like torture.
| oneplane wrote:
| The VMWare APIs are indeed pretty bad, even the ones on their
| modern products for some reason (i.e. NSX etc.) where they did
| adopt more modern methods but still managed to pull a Microsoft
| with 'one API for you, a different API for us'.
|
| Being pretty bad doesn't mean they don't work of course, but
| when the best a product has to offer is clickops, they have
| missed the boat about 15 years ago.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| I have been running proxmox at home for a few months now.
|
| It has been, to say the least, an adventure. And I have nothing
| but good things to say about Proxmox at this point. Its running
| not only my home related items (MQTT, Homeassitant), it also
| plays host to some of the projects I'm working on (postgres, go
| apps, etc...) rather than runing some sort of local dev.
|
| If you need to exit vmware, proxmox seems like a good way to go.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I've been doing that for almost two years now, including ARM
| nodes (via a fork). It's been awesome, and even though I am
| fully aware Proxmox does not match the entire VMware feature
| set (I used to migrate VMware stuff to Azure), it has been a
| game changer in multiple ways.
|
| Case in point: just this weekend a drive started to die on one
| of my hosts (I still use HDDs on older machines). I backed up
| the VMs on it to my NAS (you can do that by just having a Samba
| storage entry defined across the entire cluster), replaced the
| disk, restored, done.
| irusensei wrote:
| I appreciate projects like Proxmox but it must be also said
| that you can achieve same functionality sans the UI with tools
| available on most Linux distributions: libvirt, lx{c,d}, podman
| etc.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| True...
|
| And Proxmox is just skin on lxc and quemu/kvm.
|
| I will say that as I have just started playing with the lxc
| api, having the Proxmox UI as a quick and easy visual cross
| check has been lovely.
|
| Podman is an amazing alternative to docker, cant say enough
| good things about it.
| RamRodification wrote:
| A big one hiding in that "etc" I think is Ceph. Proxmox has a
| very nice UI for setting it up easily.
| eddieroger wrote:
| I think "adventure" is how I'd put it, too. Perhaps that which
| I found most surprising was the difference in defaults between
| the two. ESXi gave me what I considered pretty good defaults,
| where Proxmox were more conservative or generic (struggling to
| find the right word). For example, I was surprised that I had
| to pick an option for CPU type instead of it defaulting to
| host, which I would have expected. Saying that, I never checked
| on ESXi, but I never had reason to look in to performance
| disparities there.
|
| Once I found the surface, I have really grown to like it,
| expanding my footprint to use their backup server, too. Proxmox
| makes you work for it, but is worth it.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| > I was surprised that I had to pick an option for CPU type
| instead of it defaulting to host
|
| I believe the rationale for this is to prevent issues when
| migrating to different hosts that may not have the same CPU
| or CPU features. Definitely a more "conservative" choice -
| maybe it should be a node-wide option or only default to a
| generic CPU type when there is more than 1 node.
| d416 wrote:
| Your experience is very relatable. My first Proxmox adventure
| began with installing Proxmox 8 on 2 hetzner boxes: one with
| CPU, one with GPU. Spent two straight weekends on the CPU box
| and just when I was about to give up on proxmox completely I
| had a good night's sleep and things finally 'clicked'. Now I'm
| drinking the proxmox koolaid 100% and making it my go-to OS.
|
| For the GPU box I completely abandoned the install after
| attempting to do the gymnastics around GPU passthrough. I like
| Proxmox but I'm not a masochist - Looking forward to the day
| when that just works.
| shrubble wrote:
| I am researching whether to buy puts on AVGO (Broadcom, owner of
| VMware) since I believe their Vmware revenue will crater in 12
| months or so. They took on 32 billion in debt to buy VMW also,
| which will tank their stock price, I think.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I'd exercise caution, in my experience, it'll take years for
| companies to transition from VMware to somewhere else. In the
| interim, their revenue will most likely pop as they're
| squeezing the shit out of these unlucky souls.
| mvdwoord wrote:
| I concur, being close to the fire it will take years for
| large organizations to move off their VMware stacks. Inertia
| of large organizations is a thing, but mostly, there are so
| many custom integrations made with other systems, lots of
| them tied up in the vSphere stack.
|
| SDN is one thing but the amount of effort put in vROPS / vRA
| / vRO etc is not easily replaced. Workflows integrating with
| backups, CMDB, IAM, Security and what not have no catch all
| migration path with some import wizards.
|
| Meanwhile, Broadcom will happily litigate where necessary and
| invoice their way to a higher stock price.
|
| $0.02
| bityard wrote:
| All of AVGO/Broadcom's moves with VMware have been to keep
| revenue somewhat steady by focusing on their biggest customers
| locked into their ecosystem, while drastically cutting back
| everything else to lower expenses. This should produce
| excellent short-term financial results which the market will
| very likely reward with a higher stock price over the next year
| or two. The board and C-suites know what they are doing.
|
| Of course, destroying the trust they had with their customers
| means the long-term prospects of the VMware are not so good.
| gonzo wrote:
| so they sell the husk of VMware back to Dell when they're
| done.
| gruturo wrote:
| It never takes as little as you (or others, myself included)
| think it should. Big companies have a lot of inertia and
| changing anything which is working today, even if it saves a
| lot, attached your name to the risk it will fail horribly, so
| you'd be reluctant to suggest it, esp. since it's usually not
| your own money (your budget maybe, but not _your_ own money).
|
| Broadcom knows this very well and likely turned the price screw
| exactly right - just before the breaking point for the critical
| mass of their customers.
|
| What I think will lead to the eventual implosion of VMware's
| market share, on a longer timescale, is the removal of free
| ESXi. Many people acquire familiarity with small
| scale/home/demo labs or PoC prototypes, then they recommend
| going with what they're familiar with. This led Microsoft where
| they are now, by always giving big discounts to students and
| never going too hard on those running cracked copies. They saw
| it as an investment and they were bloody right. If the product
| had been better it would completely dominate now, but even as
| shoddy as it is, it's a huge cash cow.
| adr1an wrote:
| For the sake of completeness, xcp-ng is an alternative to migrate
| VMware ESXi VMs too!
| rwmj wrote:
| Does this do the hard bit, ie installing virtio drivers during
| conversion?
| justinclift wrote:
| Oh, that would be a smart move. :)
|
| If it doesn't, any idea if it's something they could automate
| easily?
| rwmj wrote:
| In recent versions: virt-customize -a
| disk.img --inject-virtio-win <METHOD>
|
| https://libguestfs.org/virt-customize.1.html
|
| However they'll also be missing out on all the other stuff
| that virt-v2v does.
| bityard wrote:
| All of the most popular Linux distros tend have the virtio
| drivers installed by default.
| rwmj wrote:
| Not in the initramfs which is rather important if you want
| them to boot without having to use slow emulated IDE. Then
| there's Windows guests.
| tiberious726 wrote:
| Anyone try to replace vsphere with the high-availabilty add-on to
| RHEL?
| matthew-wegner wrote:
| I'm in game development, and I run ESXi for two reasons:
|
| * Unmodified macOS guest VMs can run under ESXi (if you're
| reading this on macOS, you have an Apple-made VMXNet3 network
| adapter driver on your system--see /System/Library/Extensions/ION
| etworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleVmxnet3Ethernet.kext )
|
| * Accelerated 3D has reasonable guest support, even as pure
| software. You wouldn't want to work in one of those guest VMs,
| but for any sort of build agent it should be fine, including
| opening i.e. Unity editor itself in-VM to diagnose something
|
| Does anyone know where either of these things stand with Proxmox
| today?
|
| I imagine macOS VM under Proxmox is basically a hackintosh with
| i.e. OpenCore as bootloader?
| mysteria wrote:
| The SPICE backend has decent OpenGL 3D support with software
| rendering, it's slow but it works for simple graphics. It's
| intended for 2D so the desktop's pretty fast IMO. That only
| works for Linux and Windows guests though, not Apple ones.
|
| MacOS VMs do work in Proxmox with a Hackintosh setup but you
| pretty much have to passthrough a GPU to the VM if you're using
| the GUI. Otherwise you're stuck with the Apple VNC remote
| desktop and that's unbearably slow.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| For paravirtualized hardware rendering you can use virtio-
| gpu. In addition to Linux, a Windows guest driver is
| available but it's highly experimental still and not very
| easy to get working.
| bonton89 wrote:
| The lack of 3D paravirtual devices is a real sore spot in kvm.
| To my knowledge, virgl still isn't quite there but is all there
| is so far in this space. VMware has the best implementation IMO
| and everything else is a step down.
| rufugee wrote:
| Does this work with VMWare Workstation as well? I'd love to run
| macOS in a VM on my Linux desktop for the few apps I have to
| use on macOS...
| zerkten wrote:
| It has in the past for me, but I haven't run it since 2021.
| moondev wrote:
| Nested virtualization also works great on ESXi for macOS guests
| ( so you can run docker desktop if so inclined ). I believe
| this is possible with proxmox as well with CPU=host but have
| not tried it.
|
| For graphics, another cool thing is intel iGPU pci passthrough
| - I have had success with this when running esxi on my 2018 mac
| mini https://williamlam.com/2020/06/passthrough-of-integrated-
| gpu...
| t3rra wrote:
| nobody asked.
| oneplane wrote:
| Apple has been adding a lot of virt and SPICE things IIRC. Some
| of it isn't supported in VMware (it lacks a bunch of standard
| virt support), but the facilities are growing instead of
| shrinking which is a good sign.
|
| On Proxmox you can do the same. You're going to need OpenCore
| if you're not on a Mac indeed. But if you're not on a Mac
| you're breaking the EULA anyway.
| mrpippy wrote:
| Note that macOS guest support ended with ESXi 7.0:
| https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/88698
|
| Running macOS is only supported/licensing-compliant on Apple-
| branded hardware anyway, and with the supported Intel Macs
| getting pretty old this was inevitable anyway.
| moondev wrote:
| Mac mini 2018 is still the best Mac for vms
| 6 cores 12 threads 64GB DDR nvme 4
| thunderbolt3 ports for pci expansion 10GbE onboard nic
| boots ESXi boots Proxmox boots or virtualizes
| windows boots or virtualizes linux boots or
| virtualizes macos iGPU passthrough Supports
| nested virt
| bluedino wrote:
| It's the ecosystem.
|
| Sure, your organization is spending another million dollars on
| VMware this year, but what are the options?
|
| * Your outsourced VMware-certified experts don't actually know
| that much about virtualization (somehow)
|
| * Your backup software provider is just now researching adding
| Proxmox support
| (https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/22/veeam_proxmox_oracle_...)
|
| * A few years ago you 'reduced storage cost and complexity' by
| moving to VMware vSAN, now you have a SAN purchase and data
| migration on your task list
|
| * The hybrid cloud solution that was implemented isn't compatible
| with Proxmox
|
| * The ServiceNow integration for VMware works great and is saving
| you tons of time and money. You want to give that up?
|
| * Can you live without logging, reporting, and dashboards until
| your team gets some free time?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| With a million dollar per year to play with, you should
| ultimately be able to replace all of these. Especially since
| it's not like Proxmox is lacking its own third-party support
| options (but it being built on FLOSS tech still leaves you with
| a lot more flexibility).
| mavhc wrote:
| Your outsourced experts are actually just people with google.
|
| Proxmox on zfs means zfs snapshot send/receive, simple. I made
| my own immutable zfs backup system for PS5
| oneplane wrote:
| All of those points would also assume:
|
| * You are big enough to need that and actually implement it
|
| * You have the budget to do so
|
| * You actually have the need to do that in-house
|
| If you are at that scale but you don't have the internal
| knowledge, you were going to get bitten anyway. If you are not
| at that scale, you were already bitten and you shouldn't have
| been doing it anyway.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| I use Proxmox since 5 years at home. Mostly docker nested in
| unprivileged LXCs on ZFS for performance reasons. I love the
| reliability. Proxmox has never lost me. They churn out constant
| progress without making too much noise. No buzzwords, no
| advertising, just a good reliable product that keeps getting
| better.
| dusanh wrote:
| Unprivileged LXCs? Interesting, I thought containers would
| require privileged LXC. At least, that it my takeaway from
| trying to run Podman in a nesting enabled, but unprivileged LXC
| under non-root user. I kept running into
|
| > newuidmap: write to uid_map failed: Operation not permitted
|
| I tried googling it, tried some of the solutions, but reached
| the conclusion that it's happening because the LXC is not
| privileged.
| F00Fbug wrote:
| I spent 15 years managing a VMware-centric data center. I ran the
| free version at home for at least 5 years. When I ran out of
| vCPUs on my free license I switched to Proxmox and the migration
| was almost painless. This new tool should help even more.
|
| For most vanilla hosting, you could get away with Proxmox and be
| just fine. I've been running it for at least 5 years in my
| basement and haven't had a single hiccup. I bet a lot of VMware
| customers will be jumping ship when their licenses expire.
| moondev wrote:
| If proxmox supported OVA and OVF it would be huge. It seems
| technically possible as there is a new experimental kvm backend
| for virtual box which supports OVA.
|
| At the end of the day OVA is just machine metadata packaged as
| XML with all required VM artifacts, there is also some cool
| things like supporting launch variables. Leveraging the format
| would bring a bunch of momentum considering all the existing OVAs
| in the wild
| the_swd wrote:
| Proxmox documentation does mention OVF support
| https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migrate_to_Proxmox_VE#Import_OV...
|
| Seems a bit barebones, as in no support for a nice OVF
| properties launch UI, but one should be able to extract an OVA
| to an OVF and VMDK an manually edit the OVF with appropriate
| properties.
|
| I actually had plans this week to try exactly that...
| Underphil wrote:
| I've set up a ton of virtual appliances that way. It's just a
| regular ZIP file with the config and vmdk(s).
| moondev wrote:
| Interesting thanks for sharing. Surfacing this in the UI
| would be great if it works well for sure.
|
| Another handy feature is the ContentLibrary for organizing
| and launching OVA/OVF, as well as launching OVA directly from
| a URL without needing to download it next to the cli.
|
| This makes me think there could be an opportunity in
| "PhotoPea (kvm gui) for vCenter" - in the same manner
| photopea is a clean room implementation of the photoshop
| UI/UX
| RamRodification wrote:
| From the post in case you missed it:
|
| _Q: Will other import sources be supported in the future?_
|
| _A: We plan to integrate our OVF /OVA import tools into this
| new stack in the future. Currently, integrating additional
| import sources is not on our roadmap, but will be re-evaluated
| periodically._
| rafaelturk wrote:
| Proxmox is great! I just wish that they had a better initial
| plan, plans start at EUR1020.
| subract wrote:
| I see plans with access to the Enterprise repos starting at
| EUR110/yr, and plans with 3 support tickets starting at EUR340.
| EUR1020 is the starting price for a plan with a 2hr SLA.
|
| https://shop.proxmox.com/index.php?rp=/store/proxmox-ve-comm...
| luzer7 wrote:
| Does anyone have a good _basic_ guide on LVM/LVM Thin? I'm having
| a hard time wrapping my head around LVM and moving the vmdk to
| it. Mainly a Window admin with some Linux experience.
|
| I understand that LVM holds data in it but when I make a Windows
| VM in proxmox it stores the data in a LVM partition(?) as opposed
| to ESXi or Hyper-V making a VHD or VMDK.
|
| Kinda confusing .
| abbbi wrote:
| proxmox is using LVM for direct attached raw volumes. LVM is
| just a logical volume manager for linux, which gives you more
| features than using old fashioned disk partitioning. I guess
| they chose this path for windows virtual machine migration
| because windows running on vmware before, does usually not have
| the required virtio drivers installed to support the qemu
| hypervisors virtio solution for disk bus virtualization out of
| the box. It would mean the hypervisor has to simulate IDE or
| SCSI bus which comes with great overhead perfomance wise (in
| the case of migration)
|
| So an direct attached lvm volume is the best solution
| performance wise. In the vmware world this would be an direct
| attached raw device either from local disk or SAN.
|
| For fresh install on proxmox its better to chose qcow as disk
| image format with virtio-scsi bus (comparable to vhdx, vmdk,
| qemus disk format) and add virtio drivers during windows setup.
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(page generated 2024-03-27 23:00 UTC)