Migrating from ESXi to Proxmox VE - Red Hat Licensing Issue

[Aylien]

Hi all, I was wondering if anyone had any experience moving existing Red Hat Linux machines from an ESXi environment to a Proxmox one. We're in a situation and we're looking to migrate away from VMWare's hypervisors to Proxmox, but we've hit one snag; our current licensing for Red Hat is for their Virtual Datacenter setup, which needs virt-who installed which is expressly incompatible with how Proxmox sets things up.

While I've found a possible way forward, it looks hackish at best and incredibly brittle: https://qtechbabble.wordpress.com/2024/08/27/configure-rhel-virt-who-for-proxmox-ve-hypervisor/

Does anyone have any experience working with Red Hat's licensing in this sort of situation? Should we look into a different set of licenses for our machines? Our current setup with how subscriptions are handled doesn't seem to support it, and I'm unsure what steps to take next.

 

[guruevi]

We’ve moved several hosts from VMware to Proxmox, make sure to run dracut -f —add-drivers virtio-… where … is the various virtio things you want to use like net, pci, scsi (or edit /etc/dracut.conf) to add the VirtIO drivers before moving. When you’re on a VMware platform those drivers get stripped out.

Sorry to see you’ve got suckered into IBM’s inane licensing models, they do offer OpenShift for what you have ($60/core/y + $/TB/y + $support +$$$), but the good news is that unlike Microsoft, the licensing is only for support and updates, it doesn’t care whether or where you run the VM. You are able to run RHEL without any licensing, either until you buy something else or switch to another RHEL-like, you just may not get updates and support.

We just buy a site license (15,000 seats) for RHEL and run it wherever we want. We try to stay away from anything like Ansible Automation Platform, OpenShift or other lock-ins, which was rewarded when RHV imploded - saw one site that couldn’t access their GUI because their key expired, and when all you have is GUI-monkeys, you don’t know how to extract the disk images from storage, we migrated that to Proxmox too.