It's the ecosystem. Sure, your organization is spending another million dollars on VMware this year, but what are the options? * Your outsourced VMware-certified experts don't actually know that much about virtualization (somehow) * Your backup software provider is just now researching adding Proxmox support ( https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/22/veeam_proxmox_oracle_... ) * A few years ago you 'reduced storage cos…
Definitively, and situations like the Broadcom one IMO just underline that as a company you should never ever get your core infra locked into proprietary vendors' ecosystem, as that is just waiting for getting squeezed out, which they can for the reasons you laid out.
> Your outsourced VMware-certified experts don't actually know that much about virtualization (somehow).
That should be a wake-up call to have some in-house expertise for any core infra you run, at least as a mid-sized, or bigger, company. Most projects targeting the enterprise, like Proxmox VE, provide official trainings for exactly that reason.
https://proxmox.com/en/services/training
> * Your backup software provider is just now researching adding Proxmox support (https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/22/veeam_proxmox_oracle_...)
Yeah, that's understandable, one wants to avoid switching both, the hyper-visors that hosts core-infrastructure and the backup solution that holds all data, often even from the whole period a company needs to legally save that.
But as you saw, even the biggest backup player sees enough reason to hedge their offerings and takes Proxmox VE very seriously as alternative, the rest is a matter of time.
> A few years ago you 'reduced storage cost and complexity' by moving to VMware vSAN, now you have a SAN purchase and data migration on your task list
No, you should rather evaluate Proxmox's Ceph integration instead of getting yet another overly expensive SAN box. As ceph allows you to also run a powerful and near indestructible HCI storage, but avoids any lock-in as Ceph is FLOSS and there are many companies providing support for it and other hyper-visors that can use it.
> * The hybrid cloud solution that was implemented isn't compatible with Proxmox. > * The ServiceNow integration for VMware works great and is saving you tons of time and money. You want to give that up?
That certainly needs more work and is part of the chicken and egg problem that backup support is (or well, was) facing, but also somewhat underlines how lock-in works.
> * Can you live without logging, reporting, and dashboards until your team gets some free time?
Proxmox VE has some integrated logging and metrics, and provides native support to send to external metrics server, we use that for all of our infra (that runs on a dozen PVE servers in various datacenters around the world) with great success and not much initial implementation effort.
So yeah, it's the ecosystem, but there are alternatives for most things and just throwing up your hands only signals to those companies that they can squeeze you much tighter.