vSphere migration to Proxmox

[Yannick ITPRO]

Good morning,

Thank you very much for this great product that I have recently discovered that is Proxmox!

My company is currently studying an alternative solution to vSphere, following the last events (bought of VMware by Broadcom).

I am therefore in the process of doing a feasibility study and trying to set up a model identical to our current infrastructure:

We have two datacenters each consisting of a SAN bay (for HA) with a cluster of 6 ESXi (iSCSI attached) ,on each site.
The two datacenters are asynchronously replicated (via VEEAM) in order to have a disaster recovery solution.
(PS: The two SAN bays are from different manufacturers)

Before going any further, I would like to know if it is possible to do the same thing with Proxmox because, from what I have understood so far, it is only possible to replicate VMs if they are stored on a local ZFS partition.

Thanks in advance for your support.

Regards.

Yann.

 

[aaron]

We are currently working on getting a datacenter mgmt tool in place. One of the ground works for example was the possibility to do a live migration between cluster (released in Proxmox VE 7.3).

For the time being, you can build something like that yourself. You need to replicate the disk images between the cluster and the config files of your guests, located in /etc/pve/qemu-server (VMs) or /etc/pve/lxc (Containers). You can also access the config files for guests located on other nodes as they are also present in the /etc/pve/nodes/{node}/... directories.

Replicating the actual disk images depend on what kind of storage you use. If you run a Ceph cluster, you could use RBD Mirroring. If the disk Images are on ZFS, then the send/recv functionality could be used. There are quite a few tools around for that. For example, pve-zsync or zrepl.

Other storage types might have their own ways of replicating the data.

Other users might have more ideas / experience

 

[jdancer]

When vSphere/ESXi 7 came out, VMware/Delll dropped official production support for 12th-gen Dells.

Switch the entire fleet of 12th-gen Dells after flashing the disk controllers to IT-mode to Proxmox running ZFS and/or Ceph.

No issues.

I did use "qemu-img convert" initially but just learned one can just use Clonezilla instead.

Plenty of blogs/YouTubes on using Clonezilla to migrate off ESXi.

 

[Yannick ITPRO]

Great !
Thank you very much @aaron and @jdancer for your help
I will study your answers very seriously.

Yann.

 

[robertut]

an alternative solution to vSphere, following the last events (bought of VMware by Broadcom).

What are the actual concerns affecting your systems related to the Broadcom aquisition?

 

[Yannick ITPRO]

Our main concern is the cost which will certainly increase sharply and, in addition, the perpetual license mode will be removed in favor of a rental mode (if you can not pay you can no longer use) .
Not to mention all the ecosystem that follows the trend (Veeam, etc ...) and hardware support that forces you to always buy more recent servers. Too bad, we've been VMware customers forever.

Proxmox by its reliability seems to be the solution that comes closest to vSphere. And, not negligible also the quality of the support / forum as well as its open-source base (Debian, KVM, etc ...)

 

[spirit]

When vSphere/ESXi 7 came out, VMware/Delll dropped official production support for 12th-gen Dells.

Switch the entire fleet of 12th-gen Dells after flashing the disk controllers to IT-mode to Proxmox running ZFS and/or Ceph.

No issues.

I did use "qemu-img convert" initially but just learned one can just use Clonezilla instead.

Plenty of blogs/YouTubes on using Clonezilla to migrate off ESXi.

you can also use "qm disk import <vmid> yourvmdk.dk <proxmoxstorage>"

It'll use qemu-img in background, but also create lvm,zfs,ceph volume,... and import the disk in the target vm.