IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions vs. Proxmox VE vs. VMware vSphere

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Proxmox VE is a virtualization platform that provides a range of features and functionalities suitable for various scenarios. Here are some specific scenarios where Proxmox VE is well suited and some scenarios where it might not be the best choice:Well-suited scenarios:Virtualization of server workloads: Proxmox VE is well suited for virtualizing server workloads such as web servers, mail servers, database servers, and other similar applications. Its high-performance virtualization capabilities allow these workloads to run smoothly and efficiently.Hosting multiple virtual machines (VMs): Proxmox VE is ideal for hosting multiple VMs on a single server. It provides efficient resource management, allowing users to easily allocate resources to each VM.Clustered environments: Proxmox VE is a great choice for clustered environments. It supports clustering and can easily manage multiple servers, providing high availability and load balancing for mission-critical applications. Less appropriate scenarios: Limited hardware resources: Proxmox VE requires significant hardware resources to run efficiently. If you have limited hardware resources, it might not be the best choice. Simple applications: If you only need to run a single, simple application, Proxmox VE might be overkill. Other virtualization platforms or even a basic web hosting service might be more appropriate.

vSphere is well suited for multiple VMWare hosts and can be very useful in larger enterprises where vMotion is used to load balance and failover running virtual machines. In smaller businesses with one or two hosts then the features can be overkill. The addition of virtual TPM support is a very nice addition to provide vm security in a more Microsoft supported methodology.

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• Ease of use - we don't want to spend extra hours trying to figure out a problem.
• Easy Setup - onboarding was simple and quick.
• Great documentation - Most of the answers to our questions are very easily accessible without additional help.

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• ZFS storage out of the box. The integration with ZFS is fantastic. You can easily create pools to store your VM images and data on, and the Proxmox web UI provides an easy way to check drive health, ZFS scrub status, etc.
• Great web UI. Practically everything configurable is available to do so from the web user interface. You'll rarely need to drop to the command line for administrative tasks, unless you want to, in which case you can do that too. The UI also provides graphs and visualisations to help you keep check of how everything is performing.
• Easy to setup a high availability cluster. Although Proxmox VE works perfectly well on a single server, you can also install it on multiple hosts and setup a cluster.
• Uses a Debian core system with an Ubuntu based kernel. This means everything to do with the base operating system is tried and trusted. We use a lot of Debian and Ubuntu installs, so having this run underneath Proxmox VE was an added bonus for us.

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• Taking Snapshots of VMs and roll back to the previous state when faced with a problem.
• Template creation - Once you have that perfect template you can easily create new VMs. Very useful feature.
• VMotion - Being able to perform live migrations of a virtual machine from one physical server to another, without any downtime.

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• Support is horrible and or non-existent
• Documentation is out of date and incorrect for the most part
• IBM employees and salespeople are not aware of features or offerings
• Does not integrate the Zerto, only Veeam and has limited options for data migration

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• The web UI does not work as well on mobile devices. It is useable, but a mobile optimised / responsive UI would be nice to have. There is a mobile app, so that may alleviate this issue, but I have not yet tried it.
• Support in the community forums could be better. There are paid support plans, but new users trying out the software will not have access to this. Answers to questions can sometimes be terse, and I can imagine this may put some people off.
• The wiki is a bit hit and miss with certain topics. I've often seen outdated or missing information, and the whole thing looks like it could do with some polish. I'd love to see it opened up for the community to add to.

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• Allow enable EVC without requiring host shutdown
• More detail in recent tasks. Instead of just showing a task called "Reconfigure virtual machine" also have a link to more detailed information as to what was reconfigured, changed or removed.
• Allow searching tasks or events

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Proxmox VE provides the most capable, yet stable virtualization platform in the market today. Licensing options are also competitive and cost-effective for support, and support is extremely fast and knowledgable of getting issues resolved as quickly and soundly as possible.

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We are constantly looking for change that will benefit our company. We are not ones to stick with a product simply because it is what we know, but rather looking for what fits us best. We can't imagine another product on the market today doing a better job of handling our infrastructure than vSphere.

Everything is very clearly laid out. Being familiar with vSphere already, it was a quick transition over to the IBM environment. This allowed us to spend less time on the implementation phase and move quickly to actually utilizing the system on a day to day basis. Also, the performance is very good. No lagginess to the website like our previous on-prem environment.

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The interface is easy to use for most of it, but still lacks screens for some configurations. Also, a few of the screens are not as intuitive as they could be. This is specially true with disk and network configuration, where some graphic/visual representations of the configurations would be very useful

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Very useful for environments where space and energy consumption are issues and management is not very keen on upfront spending on hardware every time whenever requirement comes from any dept for provisioning a machine for their occasional use, easily can be done in case of VMware vSphere in few clicks. Backup, security, monitoring and management everything is covered but at additional cost.

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Proxmox VE's ha-cluster functionality is very much improved, though does have a not-very-often occurrence of failure. In a 2-node cluster of Proxmox VE, HA can fail causing an instance that is supposed to migrate between the two nodes stop and fail until manually recovered through the command-line tools provided. Other than this, the HA clustering capability of Proxmox VE has proven to be reliable in 3 or more clustered environments with much less chance of these failures to occur.

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Proxmox VE's interfacing is always fast to load, both the Web interface and the command-line tool interfaces. Reporting is practically real time almost all the time, and you can see everything in mere seconds, easily able to identify if something is wrong or it everything is in tip-top shape as always desired

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Overall, just a great experience here. No one in my opinion gets a perfect 10/10 rating (no one is ever perfect), so 9/10 is probably as good as it gets! From initial planning to post implementation support, the IBM Cloud and professional services has been there for my group as much as we have needed them. Great job!

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They are fast, understanding, very intelligent, know their product very well, fast, responsive, and concise. Need I say more?

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I rarely ever have to contact support and when I do need to resolve an issue, there is always an abundance of kb articles and research information available that can help quickly resolve the issue. Depending on the type of support contract you have, you may get support from some offshore group in another country and this could be a little challenging because of the language barrier.

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IBM professional services helped us plan and implement the project with great success. They guided the project from planning, scoping, pre-implementation, testing, roll-out, then production and post-production support. We were very impressed with their knowledge of VMware and really appreciated their desire to make our project a success. I would highly recommend them!

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It worked, was easy and super fast to deploy, and provided everything we needed in a matter of minutes

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Just make sure that when you implement, that the person implementing truly knows what they are doing and has a plan of action coming in. Since our initial implementation using a consulting service, I have implemented a few vSphere just from what I learned at the initial implementation and use over time, and the person implementing really needs to know what they are doing or you will miss out on features that may help you down the line

We chose VMware over Azure App Service because of the way that it was at that point natural and still offered similar cloud capacities that Azure would have acquired us. This permitted us to continue to utilize a similar interface and not need to relearn everything beginning to end with another item.

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Proxmox Virtual Environment is better, less costly, it has better CAPEX and OPEX, is open source and more robust and flexible.

It is an agnostic product, one can use a PC clone or a high end server to install it, and it works flawlessly on both.

The product has a large life cycle, is stable and has few problems and vulnerabilities than the other propietary products.

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vSphere provides more control over the Virtualization environment.

It allows users to have great management User Interface with lots of dynamic features.

VM creation.

Perform vMotion.

Network Management.

Datastore Mangement.

Cluster Management.

Schedule tasks.

Affinity and anti-affinity rules.

Easy to upgrade.

Backup the configuration data which can be restore after a disaster.

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Proxmox VE provides everything you need to quickly add new storage mediums, network and local, as well as networking interfaces, such as using Linux standard bridges and now Open-vSwitch bridges which can be even more scalable than before. Proxmox VE 4.0 dropped support for OpenVZ in favor of the more well supported and native LXC and made an upgrade path to it very simple.

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• One of our business objectives was to ensure as close to 100% uptime of our servers and applications. This solution has helped us achieve that goal.
• Another goal was to try and minimize our datacenter footprint. This was achieved by using the product.

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• Due to the open source nature of Proxmox, we have no licensing costs while training our employees
• We've migrated 100% of our clients to Proxmox and have found improved uptime, and flexibility.
• In the 10 years of using Proxmox, we've yet to lose any data or not be notified of backup issues.

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• Having vSphere helped my business quickly recover from a ransomware attack which would have crippled us for weeks if we were not virtualized. I think the ROI on something like that is immeasurable.
• vSphere has allowed my company to purchase bigger server hardware to host 3 or 4 virtual servers, which was at a cost much lower than buying 3 or 4 server hardware boxes, saving us thousands each time we need to upgrade hardware.

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