It is all over the social media and people are discussing on reddit about moving to ProxMox. Most of the discussion I saw are about no 24/7 support for enterprise customers and limited to Austrian time and some discussion about backups. Does Proxmox team monitors these messages and doing anything to attract these customers?
Is ProxMox doing anything after VMware disaster?
- Thread starter encryptedserver
- Start date
This thread here might interest you: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/n...s-support-hours-of-proxmox.137394/post-611575
I don't know.
In that thread "and is closing that gap in the Americas too" is a news but ProxMox should not wait too long, time is now for 24/7 American support before any missed opportunity and missed customers for ProxMox.
I guess 24/7 support would be quickly doable when hiring some new staff just for support (I've heard VMware just fired 2800 employees now looking for a new employer 
).
But if you want all the features that VMware products offer this will take many many years to implement them. They don't got thousands of staff members like VMware. And if Proxmox would grow that big, it probably wouldn't be the same it is now and we would complain about "bad" practices too. As soon as you grow too big you will lose your status as the "good guys".
).But if you want all the features that VMware products offer this will take many many years to implement them. They don't got thousands of staff members like VMware. And if Proxmox would grow that big, it probably wouldn't be the same it is now and we would complain about "bad" practices too. As soon as you grow too big you will lose your status as the "good guys".
99.9 % do not need 24/7, but if you really think you need it, just go for it.
We at Proxmox do not deliver this directly but some of our partner can help here.
Just to add:
If you run a closed source product like VMware you need 24/7, as you cannot even start a VM if you have any license issue. All these problems just do not exist with open source products like Proxmox VE.
We at Proxmox do not deliver this directly but some of our partner can help here.
Just to add:
If you run a closed source product like VMware you need 24/7, as you cannot even start a VM if you have any license issue. All these problems just do not exist with open source products like Proxmox VE.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/19fjyqf/any_official_word_from_proxmox_since_vmware/
This is why ProxMox need North America support ASAP before companies move to another solution, they will never come back once they go elsewhere. Proxmox have to move fast.
This is why ProxMox need North America support ASAP before companies move to another solution, they will never come back once they go elsewhere. Proxmox have to move fast.
This statement suffers from confirmation bias. It's like saying an electric vehicle does not need extended range for long motorway routes because most of the courier vans and taxis drive in the city and can recharge often. Sure, if the target market is homelabs, they do not need anything, really.
It's too risky for lots of businesses, especially no CTO will ever defend such decision to a CEO should things go wrong.
Hard to follow, the need for 24/7 is get one's license fixed to be able to start a crucial VM at an (to the vendor) inappropriate time? Really? Imploded cluster with hundreds of VMs could not be the more likely reason not to want to wait for Monday morning?
All these? Like the one state with a license? Open-source has no bugs, no regressions on updates, no vulnerabilities, nothing that a DIY cannot fix?
Now seriously, anyone who had read your (PVE team's) replies on this topic before would have gathered you prefer to keep it small, focus on development and keep a niche market, but of course leave it open for the "partners" to support it, after all it's open source. It's a valid stance, but why sugarcoat it then?
Microsoft rely on partners to do support and seems to have worked out ok for them. The PVE team have their perfectly valid plan which is developing the product. This is a clear business opportunity for a partner. This approach makes sense to me.
The issue is the plan is not even clearly formulated, as if it was hard to define it. When you look at @tom's reply above, it might appear like there's no need for support for a product like this, which is completely invalid by the very definition - multiple times, multiple forums, the lack of 24/7 was brought up. When you look at the other forum posts, it's different take yet again.
The market share, or rather the type of the market PVE competes in is niche with the current strategy. It is not wrong, but not to have it communicated openly is.
Last edited:
If you quote me, please do it right.
I talked about commercial license issues, e.g. the license expired bug years ago with VMware.
Your assumptions that we do all wrong (including our support offerings) is sometimes quite weird.
I do not know what you meant here.
You mentioned one issue with e.g. license activation. I quoted your entire post there. You might want to elaborate, but it's not even related because even a partner could be delegated to activate a license. And no I am not advocating that other product.
Of course you do not do all wrong, but this comes up on forums again and again (people asking about support). I once did. You (all) cannot tell a potential customer they do not need something when they are asking for it. You can tell them you just do not provide it because it does not work for you one way or another. They do have the need and they are willing to pay for it, so yes, they need it.
It's not wrong to have a business strategy that makes some unhappy, but it's misleading in the answers to somehow push the impression the problem has an alternative solution (e.g. partner support). It's not a solution for those customers that ask for it. They can't afford to bring it up to their CEO and essentially say:
"Hey here we can get something with limited support from the makers, but it doesn't matter as we can get 24/7 support from a partner, who anyhow we do not need so much as it's all open source, so even in-house we can fix it, do not worry about SLAs, its' best-effort and it's open-source. And if they take a direction on the next update we do not like, we will just fork it and maintain ourselves. Etc, etc."
It's unrealistic. You deserve much bigger market share. Yes, I am saying that.
I think that the meaning of what he wrote is something different than the meaning of what you wrote. So you are "attacking" him with something he did not say.
Proxmox has no license (except for AGPL 3.0); that's the whole difference. They only have support subscriptions. Proxmox will always work fine without support or subscription but the enterprise version of VmWare will not work without a license.
People often use the words license and subscription as if they mean the same, but they really don't (in English). I hope people will learn the difference.
Thanks for your feedback.
Of course, again and again the same requests and questions regarding 24/7 directly from Proxmox arises.
But this does not mean that we should change a 16 years old proven support ecosystem (with partners) just because of this. We work like this, because its the very best approach and the basis for the existence and the great success of Proxmox. We and our partners successfully moved countless VMware workloads to Proxmox VE since many years and more to come.
All former VMware customers are very welcome here.
Of course, again and again the same requests and questions regarding 24/7 directly from Proxmox arises.
But this does not mean that we should change a 16 years old proven support ecosystem (with partners) just because of this. We work like this, because its the very best approach and the basis for the existence and the great success of Proxmox. We and our partners successfully moved countless VMware workloads to Proxmox VE since many years and more to come.
All former VMware customers are very welcome here.
I looked up and I think he meant that I went on to mention other issues after picking on the licensing (which was his sole example). Sure, I could have made a new line there, the things I picked on were on top. On top of the licensing example not being relevant in my opinion.
I pick on specific items, not on people. I have nothing against @tom, I do not remember when I might have written something disapproving of his opinion previously to him here, but it's the point of open forum in my opinion.
I think this is pushing it further, the topic was 24/7 support need. The counter-example was that e.g. licensor needs to provide such support if only for being able to assist with activation. This was not a good example. Maybe there's other examples, but this one mentioned is not relevant in my opinion.
No, here we talked about licenses (of VMware) specifically.
There have been different answers to that over time given out by you folks. Not all of them make sense. Maybe I am slow, maybe it makes sense to others, I do not know, but at least it should be something consistent. I thought you picked wrong example.
Now this is a better reaction, more direct and without giving some false hopes to the OP or making him feel silly in front of his CEO.
I personally and some others on various forums simply felt you could have moved over more. It is your business decision though, that one I am not telling you how to do better, the OP was explaining why it's a pity. And there will be others in the future for sure.
i'm happy if proxmox will not hire a 100 new devs and support engineers because somebody getting dollar signs in his eyes or because vmware customers being frigthened and desperatly seeking for replacement and getting pushy because of this.
imho, that would be the same stupid greediness broadcom/vmware management has been infected with.
if you had observed vmware company behaviour for a while, it's not that big surprise what has happened.
>I am just a home user and saw ProxMox losing big paying customers on reddit and other forums.
it's just a matter of perspective. can you lose a big paying customer you never had? and is the big paying customer always the best to choose?
imho, that would be the same stupid greediness broadcom/vmware management has been infected with.
if you had observed vmware company behaviour for a while, it's not that big surprise what has happened.
>I am just a home user and saw ProxMox losing big paying customers on reddit and other forums.
it's just a matter of perspective. can you lose a big paying customer you never had? and is the big paying customer always the best to choose?
Last edited: