Category: Orchestra

Virtualization in 2024: Market Trends, Open-Source Opportunities, Broadcom’s VMware Shake-Up, and Top Solutions to Watch

(2024-12-10):
The year 2024 marked a turning point for the virtualization industry. Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, significant changes to VMware’s licensing model and pricing structure set off a wave of responses across the market. These changes had a profound impact on the virtualization landscape, altering long-held assumptions and forcing enterprises to re-evaluate their strategies. VMware had long been a leader in the virtualization space, with its solutions forming the backbone of countless enterprise data centers. Its platforms, including vSphere, vSAN, and NSX, were considered industry standards, praised for their robustness and feature set. However, post-acquisition, VMware’s licensing and pricing underwent substantial revisions. For many organizations, these changes represented a significant cost increase, leading to concerns about the sustainability of continuing with VMware’s solutions. The updates, while intended to align with Broadcom’s broader enterprise strategy, prompted businesses to reexamine their dependence on proprietary virtualization platforms. This shift created ripple effects, opening .... [read more]

XCP-ng - A More Professional Alternative to Proxmox Based on Xen

(2024-07-20):
After Broadcom increased the license fees, other virtualization solutions than VMware ESXi become very popular. I already talked about other solutions like CBSD, running on FreeBSD using bhyve for virtual machines (VM) workloads or Harvester, as an HCI solution that also allows you to run VM in a different approach. However, we mostly hear Proxmox in one of the first sentences when it comes to VMware ESXi replacements and Proxmox is a really great software based on KVM. However, there're also other solutions around and an also outstanding one is definitely XCP-ng. XCP-ng is based on Xen and follows a completely different approach than Proxmox with KVM. XCP-ng (Xen Cloud Platform - Next Generation) is an open-source virtualization platform which is created from the XenServer hypervisor. It is designed to offer a powerful, robust and also cost-effective solution for managing virtualized environments. Based on the popular Xen hypervisor, XCP-ng benefits .... [read more]