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Proxmox Import Wizard Makes for Easy VMware VM Migrations (storagereview.com) 39

Posted by BeauHD from the time-to-migrate dept.
Lyle Smith reports via StorageReview.com: Proxmox has introduced a new import wizard for Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), aiming to simplify the migration process for importing VMware ESXi VMs. This new feature comes at an important time in the industry, as it aims to ease the transition for these organizations looking to move away from VMware's vSphere due to high renewal costs.

The new import wizard is integrated into Proxmox VE's existing storage plugin system, allowing for direct integration into the platform's API and web-based user interface. It offers users the ability to import VMware ESXi VMs in their entirety, translating most of the original VM's configuration settings to Proxmox VE's configuration model (all while minimizing downtime). Currently, the import wizard is in a technical preview state, having been added during the Proxmox VE 8.2 development cycle. Although it is still under active development, early reports suggest the wizard is stable and holds considerable promise for future enhancements, including the planned addition of support for other import sources like OVF/OVA files. [...]

This tool represents Proxmox's commitment to providing accessible, open-source virtualization solutions. By leveraging the official ESXi API and implementing a user space filesystem with optimized read-ahead caching in Rust (a safe, fast, and modern programming language ideal for system-level tasks), Proxmox aims to ensure that this new feature can be integrated smoothly into its broader ecosystem.
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Proxmox Import Wizard Makes for Easy VMware VM Migrations More

Proxmox Import Wizard Makes for Easy VMware VM Migrations

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  • Win win (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Friday March 29, 2024 @06:08AM (#64353058)

    VMware users can more easily move off VMware while VMware can more easily shed a product line they no longer want to support.

    • Anything that helps facilitate dumping the jackals at Broadcom is welcome news. It will be interesting to see if the corporate exodus from VMWare is enough to ensure they never recoup their $69 billion investment.

      Good riddance.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sheph ( 955019 )
        Unless they were paid by the cloud providers to force everyone their direction.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sheph ( 955019 )
        For want of an edit button.... I wanted to add right after I hit submit that most corporations will not go to Proxmox because it's not really an enterprise solution. I like it, and I think it's a great VMWare alternative for a lab or non critical environments. Our department ended up going with Nutanix. We're not Internet connected (electrical infrastructure). Our management sees open source as a four letter word. There's no one to sue if something goes wrong. But for those who have Internet access

    • I have a hunch that VM wanted less to no longer support a product but rather get people to pay the extortion fee to continue using it.

      In other words, I doubt that they're happy about people easily dumping their crap.

      • I have a hunch that VM wanted less to no longer support a product but rather get people to pay the extortion fee to continue using it.

        Well, I'm sure that Tan would like nothing more than for every VMWare customer who's ever existed to write him a $10,000,000 check, daily. He said the quiet part out loud, and likely too early on in the process, that the goal was to keep the top 600ish customers and squeeze everyone else out.

        In other words, I doubt that they're happy about people easily dumping their crap.

        There's a subtle difference, I think: Tan is more likely to be unhappy about the fact that he doesn't get to pick which customers can easily dump their crap. In a world perfectly suited to Broadcom's wants, the VSphere

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jabuzz ( 182671 )

          The problem with the Broadcom vision is that where are the top customers going to hire their personnel from? As it stands there is a large pool of lower tier people in small installs that make a large talent pool that I can hire from, and need minimal extra training.

          If you turn VMWare into a mainframe type environment where the only way is to hire someone and then train them entirely in the platform, it is time to dump that platform.

          There is also as you point out the Oracle/Amazon scenario that will play ou

        • Itâ(TM)s 2024. Who buys on premise servers anymore? Itâ(TM)s all cloud these days and these big customers would looove to outsource to AWS and Azure their expensive infrastructure and fire their infrastructure guys to cut costs as we head into a recession.

          Cut the nose to despise the face. Where I work we just decommissioned our last server. We are now 100% cloud.

          VMware wonâ(TM)t have any customers left itâ(TM)s it isnâ(TM)t cheaper to stay in house and no proxmox is not something I

      • Don't price gouge customers, and there's no incentive to make easy tools to shitcan your product.

        Happy customers don't get happy feet.

      • I dumped @6000 Red Hat machines by using the OEL scripts provided to convert them directly to OEL. Red Hat was mega, super, uber, over-the-top pissed. They went straight to threatening to sue us. I literally laughed in their faces kicked the sales weasel out of the conference room and entire building (escorted out) and did it anyway. There were no actual repercussions whatsoever except that we saved about $350k on support costs we didn't need due to differences in OEL license terms.

        Of course, they are the

  • I migrated from VMWare to Proxmox (Score:5, Interesting)

    by linuxguy ( 98493 ) on Friday March 29, 2024 @06:35AM (#64353082) Homepage

    When I attempted to migrate from VMWare ESXi to Proxmox a few years ago, it wasn't a very smooth experience. Promox has made a lot of progress since then. I now use it even for some production loads. The UI is still not as polished as VMWare. But for the price, I am not complaining. It is a workhorse and never crashes on me.

    • I still have a half-dozen VMs running on ESXi, but as they're personal and not business and the host is one of the old free editions, I'm in no rush.

      Still, it's good to know Proxmox is now a potentially viable alternative. And having just looked, it's nice to see the backup solution is better than VMWare + Veeam... I can get rid of my last Windows system.

      I can handle a rough UI, back in the day I administered a BlackBerry server and I swear that was deliberately designed to be as frustrating as possible.

      • Proxmox has come a long way since the last time I looked at it ~4 years ago. I recently installed it here at home to handle a VM workload that just wasn't working with other lighter-weight containerization, and it's been fantastic. It may not have every single supported feature that VMware products support, but it does what I need and a whole lot more including what looks to be fairly easy clustering for high availability, VM backup, in-cluster migrations and failover, etc.

        I'd certainly be evaluating it i

        • Having used Proxmox HA/replication, I have to say it is very good, much better than just "OK" that I was expecting. Very reliable.

  • Buzzword bingo alert! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Friday March 29, 2024 @06:39AM (#64353088) Homepage

    "By leveraging the official ESXi API and implementing a user space filesystem with optimized read-ahead caching in Rust"

    Hey everyone, its written in Rust, must be awesome and cool! Get it now for kudos points!

    • Yeah programming dysfunctional software in Rust is impossible! #facepalm
  • There has been a tool (virt-to-v2v) to import VMware (and other VM's) to KVM/libvirt for ages (~2007).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jabuzz ( 182671 )

      Not that I have read the article in the finest slashdot tradition, but this I believe is a *live* migration tool. That is you suck in the VM from an ESXi host onto a Proxmox host *live* as though you were doing a vmotion on the VM, except now it ends up on a Proxmox host. XCP-ng has a similar feature. We purchased three years of support for our vSphere infrastructure last June so I have another two years to figure out what to do. Personally I am hoping for this to turn into another VRAM scenario and Broadco

  • Whatever happened to VirtualBox? Oracle inherited it long ago from Sun Microsystems, but it is GPLed, so should be safe from the likes of Broadcom.

    Why have I not heard it mentioned alongside Proxmox as an option for VMware refugees?
    I know Proxmox is a Debian based hypervisor (modified Ubuntu with KVM), while VirtualBox is application layer, but they do the same job for a small user, don't they?

    • Because VB was never given any real growth to compete with VMWare. It will run a few VMs on a dev workstation just fine, at least up to the point that they stopped supporting seamless mode, (broken in Win10/11 for several years now), and then at that point, became a 'try something out over here' type of thing. Then they broke Win7 USB support as well, invalidating the ability to run basically any Win VM in any useable way. You can however run Linux VMs still. They haven't broken that yet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quetwo ( 1203948 )

      VirtualBox is really only good for single workloads. The power of vmware/proxmarx/kvm is really the resource sharing and ability to move loads between networked machines for better resource utilization. E.g. buy a larger server and have 8-10 "machines" running on it, instead of a single load. And if a machine in your enviroment becomes unhealthy, you can move those running loads elsewhere.

    • Whatever happened to VirtualBox? Oracle inherited it long ago from Sun Microsystems, but it is GPLed, so should be safe from the likes of Broadcom.

      Why have I not heard it mentioned alongside Proxmox as an option for VMware refugees?

      Couple of reasons...

      1.) Virtualbox is, as stated, a type-2 hypervisor. It's an application that sits on top of another OS, while VMWare ESXi is an OS itself. This puts it in a largely different category, for reasons that will be clearer later on...but it's at least worth noting that in all of the years since Oracle bought Sun *and* forked Red Hat Linux, nobody, either at Oracle or in the community at large, has created a Type-1 hypervisor out of Virtualbox.

      2.) One of VMWare's main selling points is its mana

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        Because Virtualbox is a type-2 hypervisor, it is dependent on its underlying OS for storage and networking

        This is in many ways a benefit. It will support any hardware or storage that's supported by any os virtualbox itself runs on.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        Proxmox is a type-2 hypervisor that masquerades as a type-1.

  • >"Proxmox Import Wizard Makes for Easy VMware VM Migrations"

    XCP-NG/XO has had that for a long time:

    https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/1... [xcp-ng.org]
    https://xcp-ng.org/docs/migrat... [xcp-ng.org]

  • Seriously, I like the idea of Proxmox getting support for new things. (I use Proxmox on my own systems.) But did this line item in the release notes really warrant a /. summary?

    Also, the unnecessary mentioning of how "ideal" Rust is. You were trying to bait me weren't you BeauHD? TFS should be considered flamebait for that comment alone.....

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