There are a few broad categories to building one of these platforms.. core virtualization ("relatively easy"), device model ("medium hard"), storage management ("hard"), management plane ("medium hard").
VMWare popularized x86 core virtualization and defined their own device model because they were the early market leader. But the device model is pretty bizarre and I haven't been particularly impressed by the guest driver quality over the years. VMFS and vSAN seem good for storage, the latter being better than anything open source. Management plane was mediocre, I remember it took a while to move off Flash and fat clients while cloud vendors were showing none of that was necessary from inception, and everything is kind of in a walled garden by design (embedded DB etc).
VSAN was a weird one until I understood the logic behind it, but the licensing costs kind of brought on-par to buying a SAN and be happy.
I haven't touched Microsoft Hyper-V.
I assume this means that you were using Vmware Workstation? The VDDK is for Vmware vSphere, which -IIRC- runs on Linux and coordinates computers running ESXi, which are where vSphere VMs actually run.
Not that many people are going to be using Vmware Workstation to run a large number of VMs.
And I was like... what virtual host?
What I found was Server 2003 running on VMWare Workstation, running on a Windows 7 Dell PC sitting at the bottom of a rack.
A lot of people think VMWare Workstation is the pinnacle product of the company and I have NFI how this came to be.
Sure, a type-1 hypervisor like vSphere is technically better since there's no host OS creating unmanageable contention and if you have guests with higher performance requirements then yeah it's settling for something half-assed.
But in reality, we have some similar shit to a "fax server" that has manually set up weird manufacturer printer settings (local admins tried to be automated/distributed) and old third-party software libraries that "infects" a system globally (2 versions of that library cannot co-exist on a computer).
If that piece of crap can be contained on a VM, as long as it's contained and keeps trucking after a restart/powercycle everyone is happy. What kind of VM container hosts it is really secondary.
(What the software in question is can probably be inferred from the comment, the software is liked by users at the client so it's not going away)
If I were starting a company today I would make sure that the majority of my apps were web based. (CRM[netsuite or sf.com], O365/GoogleDocs, workday|gusto, etc.)
I do understand the argument that it can be considered as a benefit for society if companies that have a very incompetent management that falls for this kind of trap of getting locked in by some vendor without having an emergency escape plan available get milked or even get bust. :-)
Problem with incentives, I would say.
I don't think anyone finds this flavor of activity beneficial. What's beneficial is the underlying system that is sufficiently free and flexible that great things (like VMware to begin with) are possible. As much as we don't like "this" we don't want to put any bureaucrats in power to squash creativity and enterprise.
Much like freedom of speech means someone can speak abhorrently, freedom of enterprise means someone can do bad or dumb business things. But we enjoy the thing in totality.
That was literally Broadcom’s reason for existing before Avago even acquired them. It’s the other half of the Qualcomm/Broadcom telecom duopoly.
Why is your place of work not moving wholesale to Proxmox? It's mad that HyperV is chosen as a solution in this day and age.
If they build their new Datacenter Manager offering into what vCenter offered and abstract away all the ugliness (imagine creating a "distributed" switch on Proxmox with two clicks) I think they will make a killing.
24/7 support will be available starting in October:
* https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/company-details/press-relea...
The other thing perhaps worth noting that the entire stack is open source, even Proxmox's 'special sauce' for management. Depending on your organization, if you can solve a problem with Debian (and Qemu) you can solve a problem with Proxmox.