GUI comparison: Proxmox VS vSphere (aka vCenter + ESXi)

[Hi-Angel]

I work in a small but growing company with a bit rudimentary infrastructure that has at this point 3 vSphere servers of different versions (which from what I hear don't even have a legal license, though I can't check that as VMware apparently doesn't provide any way for that).

I want to set up a server that allows creating/destroying VMs for CI purposes, and planned to do so with QEMU, which (long story short) led me to Proxmox.

But I have a colleague (a new one, so he couldn't have influenced current "3 non-legal vSpheres" situation) who apparently has lots of experience with ESXi, and he wants me to go with ESXi. His reasoning is ESXi is very popular, so if someone else has to maintain CI infrastructure later on, such people would be easy to find (because we already have vSphere and various engineers who work with it).

I have experience with neither, so I rather drawn to Proxmox as it's open source (which has a number of benefits for us developers).

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My Question: from looking at screenshots, Proxmox is very similar to vSphere in GUI (i.e. web-interface). How complicated do you think it might be for someone only familiar with vSphere to figure out how to do similar things in Proxmox? Offhand I'm thinking of tasks like: creating/configuring VMs, creating datastores, creating users that have access to different VMs, maybe adding a FiberChannel datastore…

 

[LnxBil]

The actual CI stuff is only possible with CLI, so you need ovftool for VMware, which does what you want (we use it extensively, because the ESXi GUI sux in comparison to PVE). PVE itself has also CLI and has a REST backend to run stuff.

Maybe I'm a bit biased, beeing a Linux-Guy since the 90s, but VMware ESXi and Hyper-V GUIs are not as good as PVE is with respect what I need (your mileage may vary). I've worked with all of them (still has to), and have running ESXi and Hyper-V inside of PVE for all customers needing those specific hypervisors. Explicitely the automation-part is very easy with PVE, it can be incorporated into bash.

Of course it's not all perfect, not having a fiberchannel capable storage with snapshots is a big bummer in comparison to ESXi and Hyper-V. Although, that's a Linux problem, not a PVE problem per se. Not having a HCL may also be a problem, yet I never encountered a problem before.

I suspect, that there exist more admins that are able to work with Debian in the enterprise setting than with VMware ESXi, so technically PVE would be at least (with the complex problems like fiberchannel) the better option. Most problem you may encounter are in complex environments, and a strong Debian (or Linux) background is VERY helpful. PVE is no magic and you can look at the source.

 

[EllyMae]

I work in a small but growing company with a bit rudimentary infrastructure that has at this point 3 vSphere servers of different versions (which from what I hear don't even have a legal license, though I can't check that as VMware apparently doesn't provide any way for that).

I want to set up a server that allows creating/destroying VMs for CI purposes, and planned to do so with QEMU, which (long story short) led me to Proxmox.

But I have a colleague (a new one, so he couldn't have influenced current "3 non-legal vSpheres" situation) who apparently has lots of experience with ESXi, and he wants me to go with ESXi. His reasoning is ESXi is very popular, so if someone else has to maintain CI infrastructure later on, such people would be easy to find (because we already have vSphere and various engineers who work with it).

I have experience with neither, so I rather drawn to Proxmox as it's open source (which has a number of benefits for us developers).

---

My Question: from looking at screenshots, Proxmox is very similar to vSphere in GUI (i.e. web-interface). How complicated do you think it might be for someone only familiar with vSphere to figure out how to do similar things in Proxmox? Offhand I'm thinking of tasks like: creating/configuring VMs, creating datastores, creating users that have access to different VMs, maybe adding a FiberChannel datastore…

I don't know anything about vSphere. But I have learned that the Proxmox web interface is not complete. It will get you through most of the basic stuff. But I find myself needing to use the CLI and edit config files. I also regularly use the underlying Linux console ("shell") to do things like managing ZFS and using htop to monitor performance. I am modestly experienced with Linux; it's been a learning experience at every step.