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ramgineyesterday at 11:01 PM5 repliesview on HN

I got my current job because I could lead the hyper-v to VMware migration project. Just this year I led the VMware to hyper-v migration project. VMware was such a great product (although a bit cumbersome in the VCF environment I managed). It’s really unfortunate it went the way of Broadcom. In comparison Hyper-v feels like a typical Microsoft product. A bunch of different tools created by different teams to do tasks that feel bolted on and afterthoughts. I have to run FCM to manage the nodes? But I run HVM to manage the roles? But there’s no overall resource management like VMware vsphere or proxmox does natively?

I’ve quietly built a proxmox cluster in our environment for semi-prod workloads for when the inevitable windows host has issues.


Replies

kev009today at 12:58 AM

Corporate IT is kind of a parallel universe to me, so it is interesting to see how widely used these products are and how impactful these types of events are.

There are a few broad categories to building one of these platforms.. core virtualization ("relatively easy"), device model ("medium hard"), storage management ("hard"), management plane ("medium hard").

VMWare popularized x86 core virtualization and defined their own device model because they were the early market leader. But the device model is pretty bizarre and I haven't been particularly impressed by the guest driver quality over the years. VMFS and vSAN seem good for storage, the latter being better than anything open source. Management plane was mediocre, I remember it took a while to move off Flash and fat clients while cloud vendors were showing none of that was necessary from inception, and everything is kind of in a walled garden by design (embedded DB etc).

sigmoid10yesterday at 11:19 PM

I actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows over the years that once I tried out hyper-v for the first time last year, I somehow have never touched vmware again. Sure vmware has better configs, cleaner interface and some very subtle design advantages. But damn, hyper-v just fucking works and it keeps working across updates. I have a VM that has been running for a year and it is still perfectly doing exactly what it should. I never experienced that with vmware.

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manjose2018today at 2:37 AM

Does your company have a ton of thick-client apps? I feel like so many workloads are on the web right now and thick clients are slowly becoming a thing of the past - but maybe in Enterprise there are still stubborn thick client Win32 apps that are mission critical.

If I were starting a company today I would make sure that the majority of my apps were web based. (CRM[netsuite or sf.com], O365/GoogleDocs, workday|gusto, etc.)

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tstrimpleyesterday at 11:58 PM

I've lead roughly $20M in cloud migration projects in the last two years away from vmware to cloud services as replacements. Just insane what MBAs are willing to do to a product to squeeze short term profits. Even more insane that this country largely sees these people as a benefit to society and not the vultures they are.

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Flere-Imsahotoday at 6:29 AM

> quietly built a proxmox cluster

Why is your place of work not moving wholesale to Proxmox? It's mad that HyperV is chosen as a solution in this day and age.

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