I finally gave up on esxi 7 a few months ago as I could not get usb audio to work from a vm anymore. Passthrough worked in 6.5 but after days of googling I came to the conclusion that it has been removed by vmware for some reason in 7 and higher.
Now running proxmox and couldn’t be happier. Way more powerful with more features. Exporting esxi vms was surprisingly easy and my Nethserver vm was down for a very short time during the transition. Running mirrored zfs on all drives.
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Thank you @happnatious1 for your opinion and sharing your experience. I am now familiar with Proxmox, for now I am working on the APC UPS snmp-ups solution to make it work.
@happnatious1 personal and possibly flawed guess: VmWare wants to cut-off the uncertified realm of hardware that had been connected to ESX since the market deployment.
Starting with external, proceiding with internal (in fact i cannot add NVMe driver to ESX8, but i can on ESX7… so I installed on a Apple MacPro trashcan).
A hardware-partner request? Well… ESX 6.7 has been released to market in 2018, ESX 7 in 2020, 8 in 2022. VmWare inc. changed owner/mainshareholders few times, but still Dell Inc has some… stronghand in there. So having a close relationship with a enterprise-class hardware brand might… steer some decision to “better sell than support”.
Some people can say… “proxmox is an alternative”. I cannot agree.
Proxmox PVE is gaining a lot of traction and can do so many things close to ESX, but it’s not.
Takes advantage of two solid products as KVM and LXC, allowing to run both VMs and Containers, it appears to be really solid, capable. But as products that relies on PVE? I mean…
If you look into ESX backup products, I assume than at least 20-30 could be found, from GPL products to licensed software like Veeam. For PVE, outside integrated OS backup solution (like NethServer) excluding PBS … 5 names? Ok, underlying there’s debian, KVM, LXC, but the integration with Proxmox is not the same.
On the other hand, on ESX hardware device producers would like to… “cash” the ESX connection, like APC did. Unfortunately, VMWare cut too many ropes that were available in the past, so PVE might be a nice alternative, but don’t forget that under the hood, there’s Debian with an Ubuntu Kernel.
Considering what happened to RedHat few months ago… I’d love not to see Canonical play similar game for increase revenues faster.
Starting from ProxMox customers.
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Proxmox beats ESXi any time, flat!
VMWare has such a crappy supported hardware list, and has gone from bad to worse.
Most “Features” are paid for extras - yet still not as good as on Proxmox, which provides them all for free!
Where Proxmox easily beats VMWare:
- Backups
- Clustering
- Fast Migration
… and a lot more!
Best of all:
A simple licensing option, worth it’s price!
Almost all my clients use a paid subscription for Proxmox, at 100€/year per CPU socket it’s cheap compared to VMWare ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, or Citrix Xen…
How much do your clients pay for VMWare ESXi licensing? Or is it too expensive, you have to use the extremly limited free option?
My 2 cents
Andy
Is quite notorious (and refreshed a lot o times) that you are a ginormous fan of PVE 
bold phrase was a easy bet.
But “crappy supported hardware list” is a bit misleading as definition.
I can agree that is more and more restricted during the years, but this also helps reduce hiccups and headaches if you’re trying to push the limits of the platform. Still I don’t love the IBM/Apple way to manage hardware-software relationship (my software runs only on my hardware) but the most of the results about reliability and compatibility issues are definetively better than the average experience.
Unfortunately the relationship between VmWare and hardware vendor leads to pricey hardware to make things work.
On the other hand (paid to free feature ratio) I’d love to remember that as many others projects, they’re are standing on the shoulder of giants. Debian, LXC, KVM. VmWare might have took advantage during the history of the product on reading some sources, but had to pay a lot of coding work. And as far as i know, no one considers “cheap” software licenses, unless was paying a lot more before (Mainframe to OS400, for instance).
I’m not in the position to share customers licences fees. I bet that your customer, befoure paying proxmox, were paying ESX in several flavours. I hope that canonical won’t go whimsical about its kernel.
And we all also know you as an advocate for Microsoft - yet strange enough, you’re not using a Microsoft firewall…
My 2 cents
Andy
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Advocate? Never see that coming.
What I always tried to say is “Microsoft sucks a lot less nowadays” (and you agreed), not willing for debate about the fairness of licenses and fees. I mean… last Patch Tuesday awarded the whole community of a massive laugh about “you should only install english OS and software” because Exchange patches won’t correctly install on different languages… but no project can be defined “bugproof” and “patchsafe”. Log4j still there to tell “you’re doing wrong”…
Two indicators:
NethServer 7.x, but also Proxmox PBS can update for years - without needing a reboot.
A well maintained Windows System will need at least a reboot once a Month, for the Patchday release of .Net, if not for the OS…
→ So higher avaiability and security for Linux / UN*X systems with less downtime.
And any halfway good hacking group will hack into the best protected Windows Systems like butter, see the US Government vs China (or Russia) here…
And as seen at a friend / client: Opening up a browser page on a home system (No Internet involved, the home system was freshly installed) can still cause a Windows System to get a Blue Screen!
Using Edge Browser AND Firefox with latest upgrades…
And the page worked on other PCs and Mac / Linux…
Trust Microsoft?
Trust is good, double-checking is even better!
→ Atributed to the good old Josef, aka (also known as) Josef Stalin!
My 2 cents
Andy
But more important: What about Winodws Firewall! Was the last one with SBS 2012?
In any case, this is a support Post, not a chat post, and from that point of view, we’re already very off topic now!
We could open a chat about this, but I really think that besides a few Die-hards who’ve never tried Proxmox, most here use Proxmox as Hypervisor, after, like me, having used VMWare for years.
And, the user in question here seems to just have moved from VMWare to Proxmox.
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…except that Neth, PBS, PVE, and anything else running Linux really should reboot when a new kernel is installed. e-smith/SME enforced that far too frequently; Neth and the rest do it too little.
A parallel issue comes up with TrueNAS a lot, where the recommended hardware list is also pretty narrow, though it will “work” (for certain values of “work”) on just about any x64 hardware with enough RAM. So which is better? To only work on a limited set of known-solid hardware; or to “work” on just about anything, including garbage hardware that’s flaky on a good day? My Intel X710 NIC was supposed to work under Proxmox–but didn’t; I had to downgrade to an X520. But sure, you can use your POS Realtek NIC. Particularly in a business environment, I think there’s a strong argument to be made that the VMWare model could be better.
Not to mention that PCIe passthrough is very immature in Proxmox. For lots of applications, that matters–but for some (like virtualized TrueNAS), it’s critical.
As you know, I like and use Proxmox–and I’ve got a bit of money in proper server-grade hardware to run it on (and I’d like to grab another pair of R630s when budget allows). But I’m pretty sure there’s a reason that ESXi is the industry standard beyond simple inertia.
AFAIK, NethServer excepted, but Proxmox PBS (Proxmox running LXC can’t pull this trick for obvious reasons, the LXC will crash!) does this fairly well according to best practices…
After installing a newer Kernel, PBS will reload (“boot”) from the newer Kernel using a sort of virtual initrd, until the newer Kernel is completly running of the newer system. This has been practiced for several years on AIX, for a long time (20y?) the ONLY UN*X able to update the Kernel without rebooting (and probably also reverse desgned for Linux a few years back) …
In my opinion, this is the best way to go, a decent compromise between reboots, availability and security!
You can also enforce a reboot for every editor update, like Microsoft does when Word (Office) is updated. Libreoffice doesn’t NEED a reboot to update a office packet! Yet it’s still easy to break into the latest and best protected Microsoft resources, as mentioned somewhere above…
Probably, by ijust installing MS Office, you’re inducing a massive insecurity in the system, any following reboot is just a placebo for peace of mind.
I dare say the MS systems used by the US government are among the best protected Microsoft systems out there (OK, maybe not every branch!)… Yet, apparently, the chinese can read that stuff “on demand”, like before a high level visit by Blinken or whoever…
Every farmer knows that monocultures aren’t good for the land…
Continuing the 60ies philosophy in IT: “No manager ever got fired for ordering IBM…”
And then came the two guys in a garage…
My 2 cents
Andy