Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

uriahlight wrote: post #3

The sad part is that most companies using VMWare could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares.

> […] could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares.

As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago.

Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenStack is useful for many large scale environments (especially with tenant isolation and usage tracking/billing/chargebacks).

Proxmox is good a good solution for SMBs, but (especially pre-9.x) there were a bunch of things that made it much less usable for large(r) scale deployments IMHO.

Re: Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

#5

Post by Jedd » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 10:48 PM UTC

From TFA

> VMware to Proxmox migrations are not affected ...

Amusingly - and acknowledging tiny scale and modest automation requirements of home lab compared to enterprise - as I started migrating to Proxmox a year or two ago, the process of shuffling VMs off my ESXi servers and onto Proxmox was surprisingly painless. Effectively mount the ESXi as storage systems, and then 'copy to here'.

IIRC the only small challenges were a conservative choice on target VM's CPU type (Proxmox seems to dislike defaulting to 'host' CPU) and the network / SCSI controller defaults. I assume designed to prioritise robustness over performance.

All automatable, I'm sure.

Re: Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

#6

Post by akulbe » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 10:54 PM UTC

More VMware - winning friends and influencing people, like usual.

Re: Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

#7

Post by nubinetwork » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 10:55 PM UTC

Rather than converting the cold vm disk, couldn't you boot up the vm, dump the disks to stream, and send the streams into another format?

Re: Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

#8

Post by kiney » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 10:58 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #4

uriahlight wrote: post #3

The sad part is that most companies using VMWare could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares.

> […] could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares. As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago. Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenS…

I was working on a pretty big proxmox setup back in 2016...

Re: Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

#9

Post by ramgine » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 11:01 PM UTC

I got my current job because I could lead the hyper-v to VMware migration project. Just this year I led the VMware to hyper-v migration project. VMware was such a great product (although a bit cumbersome in the VCF environment I managed). It’s really unfortunate it went the way of Broadcom. In comparison Hyper-v feels like a typical Microsoft product. A bunch of different tools created by different teams to do tasks that feel bolted on and afterthoughts. I have to run FCM to manage the nodes? But I run HVM to manage the roles? But there’s no overall resource management like VMware vsphere or proxmox does natively?

I’ve quietly built a proxmox cluster in our environment for semi-prod workloads for when the inevitable windows host has issues.

Re: Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

#10

Post by gerdesj » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 11:09 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #4

uriahlight wrote: post #3

The sad part is that most companies using VMWare could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares.

> […] could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares. As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago. Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenS…

I started migrating my customers from VMware a good three years ago.

It does help that I have thirty years Linux experience compared to the paltry twenty five or so of VMware (which was RedHat plus stuff back in day)

I also have rather a lot of Hyper V exposure too and I defy you to love its iSCSI and networking, let alone that awful vTPM thingie.

It's Proxmox for me, any day. Even when I've completely knackered it I can always boot a systemrescuecd and mount and chroot the thing back to life.