The sale of VMware to Broadcom has changed the virtualisation landscape within the SME community.

VMware is now a subscription only product and previously supplied perpetual licenses and support hold no value. If customers want to upgrade or buy VMware now then it’s essentially pay for it again on an annual subscription basis. This can be a costly scenario with VMware licensing now as expensive as the hardware required to run it. VMware v7 goes end of life in April 2024 forcing many customers to consider their virtual future.

Some customers will stick with VMware not out of loyalty but out of wishing to avoid the complexity of changing course. For many others there are technology alternatives worth exploring. Blueloop recommend looking at Proxmox. This Open Source Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solution requires no license cost and is gaining considerable traction as a ready-made VMware replacement. We do encourage customers to buy into the Community support level from Proxmox themselves to provide access to the latest software updates.

VMware to Proxmox

Proxmox demands a different infrastructure model from VMware. Whereas VMware supports SAN storage through VMFS there is no way to gain the full functionality of Proxmox with a traditional SAN environment. The storage protocols on Proxmox don’t support the likes of HA and vMotion as they do on VMware with a SAN. Instead Proxmox uses hyper-converged technology so you don’t need a SAN, instead local storage on each node is shared with other nodes to gain the same functionality. The result is you don’t buy a SAN but you do buy big storage for each node. For a three node Proxmox cluster the cost is neutral to the equivalent hardware solution for VMware with SAN storage.

Veeam Backup for Proxmox

Veeam Backup and Replication version 12.2 introduced native support for Proxmox VE. This allows customers to backup and recover their virtual machines with the same features as VMWare users. Blueloop off-site backup and recovery customers can backup their clusters with us for additional peace of mind.

If you are wondering what to do next with your virtual environment whether it is an on-premise or cloud solution then get in touch.