No applicable section to post this - Support Hours of Proxmox

[n01k]

Hello Proxmox team.

I have reviewed the forum sections and did not find any spot that is applicable for me to post my comments so I decided to post in this section. Sorry.
This is not in any way meant to be negative to Proxmox. All I care about is the growth and success of proxmox, one cluster at a time.

Who I am? A senior systems administrator in Canada. I manage multiple VMware clusters globally for my organization.

If anybody has been following big tech news over the last year, Broadcom has recently closed their deal in purchasing VMware. The aquisitoin was completed days ago and Broadcom has already started to lay staff off in various areas of the company.

This will impact training, sales, support in order for Broadcom to meet their financial goals.

What does this have to do with Proxmox? Well, within the systems administration group, Proxmox is a very capable alternative to VMware. I have spent countless hours reading up about various hypervisors and Proxmox is often suggested as the alternative to VMware.

You have a good capable product. I am going to guess that your user count and your subscriptions for your services will increase in the next 2-4 years as VMware pushes out smaller organizations due to lackluster support, price increases, etc.

Broadcom has a terrible track record and many predict that this will negatively impact VMware customers. Those Top 100 companies that are knee-deep in VMware will be the target for Broadcome to milk them. The rest, like my organization will not be able to afford or justify the eventual price increases in vmware licensing and decreased support.

Proxmox is discussed often as a solid and positive replacement, until people get word of the support hours.

"3.14. Business hours
The Proxmox enterprise support team is available on Austrian business days between 7:00 to 17:00
(CET/CEST) - (7 a.m. to 5 p.m.)."

At best for Proxmox VE Premium, the following is offered:

"+ Response time 2 hours within a business day (on critical support requests)"


Now, I understand that if there is an issue with one host in the cluster, the cluster should be healthy enough to take the workload. But in the event that something ocurs and Proxmox support is needed, those of us in North America cannot wait the time difference to get support.

I work within the manufacturing sector and if we had some kind of corruption/crash and a critical service/system was not functional, we could be loosing tens of thousands of dollars per hour.

So my question is, as Proxmox has developed very well over these years, why hasn't the support been adjusted to provide coverage for American timezones? If the comment is that "Well we don't get a lof of interest from American companies" then I would say that your support options reduce the interest of some.

I think now is the most important time for Proxmox to focus on the customer expansion and continued growth of the company. VMware is not going anyway anytime soon, but a large amount of their clients will be looking to move away from them over the next little while. My IT department will also be doing the same and we will be looking at alternative solutions to VMware.

Unless the goal is to keep this within Europe and isolate your customer base that is +8 hours away, then this is working.

In my enviroment, I have 7 VMware clusters globally. If we moved over to Proxmox in the next year or so, we would be buying 30,280.00 of annual subscriptions to protect our clusters. Unfortunalty this won't be accepted by my IT management due to the reduced support capabilities.

Delete this post, lock it, Do whatever you must if this is somehow against the forum rules.

I just wanted to get this out in the open as this is somethign that is being discussed more and more given the current VMware situation.


Lots of respect to the Proxmox team and community.

Thank you

 

[t.lamprecht]

Hello!

I have reviewed the forum sections and did not find any spot that is applicable for me to post my comments so I decided to post in this section. Sorry.

Just FYI, this is our community support forum, while staff is on here a lot, helping all around, for official inquiries you can always write a mail to office@proxmox.com directly, but I think your post is also fine here, especially as more people might ask themself something like that in the near future.

So my question is, as Proxmox has developed very well over these years, why hasn't the support been adjusted to provide coverage for American timezones? If the comment is that "Well we don't get a lof of interest from American companies" then I would say that your support options reduce the interest of some.

Note that we have a reseller partner network for exactly that reason, those operate in the local markets, and for the cut they receive reselling on Proxmox VE subscriptions they provided first-level support in the respective hours, with access to our support engineers and developers for anything that goes deeper or the like.

See: https://www.proxmox.com/en/partners/explore
Or just for Northern America. Please note that we only list the silver and gold leveled partners on our website to promote those, that want to really drive Proxmox projects forward, the most.

Our highest-level gold partner also must have some staff members that completed an official training course of ours (most silver partner also have such staff around, but it's a hard requirement for gold).
Finally, our partners can also provide additional services on top, e.g., we have some in Europe that provide 24/7 support and phone support as additional package.

So, while our direct offering is (for now) limited to our Austrian business hours, our growing partner network has already closed that gap in Europe completely, and is closing that gap in the Americas too, IMO especially within the next months, as the effects of the recent events will start to have a real impact.

Also, in my experience, a training of their own infrastructure/support engineers from one of our training partners also help to ensure that most issues are already sorted before even having to rely on some support inquiry.
https://www.proxmox.com/en/services/training

 

[esi_y]

Note that we have a reseller partner network for exactly that reason, those operate in the local markets, and for the cut they receive reselling on Proxmox VE subscriptions they provided first-level support in the respective hours, with access to our support engineers and developers for anything that goes deeper or the like.

See: https://www.proxmox.com/en/partners/explore
Or just for the Northern America. Please note that we only list the leveled partners on our website to promote those, that want to really drive Proxmox projects forward, the most.

I had exactly the same question when first started looking around here, got similar answer, I understand it, it might still put someone off (or their managers) that they cannot get it directly from an employee (be it a remote one in their respective timezone) of the actual provider of the solution, but what is really unfortunate is NOT to emphasize this on the website - when on finds the Proxmox website, he intuitively goes on to look for support and it feels like that's it. It would really help to put a big announcement there for everyone looking for 24/7 (or business hours of XYZ timezone of youres), please go see these partners of ours.

The other little marketing thing I would have changed is the "buy now and read the docs" .. it's really unfortunate to make it sound like they get to read the docs for paying for the support. Something like "Also available at no additional cost is the docs" would give a better vibe ...

 

[esi_y]

Delete this post, lock it, Do whatever you must if this is somehow against the forum rules.

I just wanted to get this out in the open as this is somethign that is being discussed more and more given the current VMware situation.

One of the reasons I stayed around even after initially finding out this will be a hard sell to non-IT (=CFO) was that when I came with even the bluntest of feedback, I was NOT censored, blocked or ousted out of convenience of good appearances. I think this post helps communicating a valid concern and if more find it in the future, it might drive a commercial decision at Proxmox themselves, it's good to have the communication channels open.

 

[n01k]

Hello!

Just FYI, this is our community support forum, while staff is on here a lot, helping all around, for official inquiries you can always write a mail to office@proxmox.com directly, but I think your post is also fine here, especially as more people might ask themself something like that in the near future.


Note that we have a reseller partner network for exactly that reason, those operate in the local markets, and for the cut they receive reselling on Proxmox VE subscriptions they provided first-level support in the respective hours, with access to our support engineers and developers for anything that goes deeper or the like.

See: https://www.proxmox.com/en/partners/explore
Or just for the Northern America. Please note that we only list the leveled partners on our website to promote those, that want to really drive Proxmox projects forward, the most.

Our highest-level gold partner also must have some staff members that completed an official training course of ours (most silver partner also have such staff around, but it's a hard requirement for gold).
Finally, our partners can also provide additional services on top, e.g., we have some in Europe that provide 24/7 support and phone support as additional package.

So, while our direct offering is (for now) limited to our Austrian business hours, our growing partner network has already closed that gap in Europe completely, and is closing that gap in the Americas too, IMO especially within the next months, as the effects of the recent events will start to have a real impact.

Also, in my experience, a training of their own infrastructure/support engineers from one of our training partners also help to ensure that most issues are already sorted before even having to rely on some support inquiry.
https://www.proxmox.com/en/services/training

Thank you very much for the excellent reply.

I think now this falls into communication. You outlined it well in this forum post, but that should also be communicated much more clearly on the support webiste.

"hey, we follow Austrian business hours, but if you are in north america, one of our resellers will be able to support you to the same quality and service as Proxmox"

Just an example.

But thank you. This helps me and I will look into that further. All I know is that when I sit on reddit.com/r/sysadmin, whenever proxmox is mentioned, it always comes up that the support hours are the downfall. Because people don't know and this is not communicated enough as it should be.

 

[n01k]

One of the reasons I stayed around even after initially finding out this will be a hard sell to non-IT (=CFO) was that when I came with even the bluntest of feedback, I was NOT censored, blocked or ousted out of convenience of good appearances. I think this post helps communicating a valid concern and if more find it in the future, it might drive a commercial decision at Proxmox themselves, it's good to have the communication channels open.

Thank you.

All i want is to deploy Proxmox and move away from VMware in the near future. VMware is extremely expensive and we just don't have enough of a complex enviroment to warrant using VMware. Proxmox and it's functionality is ideal. I would rather have our CTO pay Proxmox and help grow them then toss more money into the hands of VMware-Broadcom, while they are laying off people to meet their financial promises to investors.

I get it, business is business but if there are other alternatives and capable ones, I'd rather help and work towards those.

PIcking up and moving enviroments won't be a speedy or quick task, but I've been trying to slightly engage with management that there are other alternative options that do the same as VMware in our situation.