100% nailed my current issue.
We need to get off of VMWare as the min license for us is now $15k pre year… from $3k. But the MSP knows the support for ProxMox isn’t there, and they have SLA contracts to uphold.
I’m going to have to HyperV which I expect to have the same issues as VMWare soon enough/someday.
IMHO the key thing is to build your ability to switch. VMware did this because nobody has plans to switch their hypervisor. Learn to.
If you go to Hyper-V this year, leave yourself the flexibility to move away from it in a couple years. Choose backup solutions and storage solutions which enable flexibility.
Any recommendation on how we would do that?
We back up VM’s with Veeam, but we don’t back up the content outside of the VM presence if that makes any sense.
They’re effectively telling me we go to hypervisor this year before Feb for VMWare billing reasons. And my hope is that by the time I get tired of HyperV, or we need to move that a solution exists to convert to next.
It’s either that, or they’re trying to sell me on scale computing VM’s and their hardware.
Veeam is a good start because they already support a bunch of hypervisors and are working on more. But for example, Veeam can't yet do replication with Proxmox, but it can with VMware and Hyper-V.
For hardware, I'd avoid going in on hypervisor platforms that need you to buy their specific hardware. Your standard Dell, HP, Lenovo servers can run almost anything, but if you buy a hyperconverged system you are going to get yourself locked in.
A big lesson I learned is: Make sure to divide up your storage pools enough! There's no easy way to gradually migrate if your storage array is one big VMware VMFS file system.
Oh, one more thing: Straight up ask other vendors about hypervisor support. If I'm having a conversation about another type of product and they tell me they support VMware and Hyper-V, I'm going to ask them what to expect if I switch to Proxmox in a couple years.
The way a vendor answers this won't just help you avoid future lock in, it'll likely reveal a lot about a company's confidence in their product and their support team.