I was a VMware admin. I drank the freakin koolaid. Got the certs. I was planning on a career as an architect. Did ok.

Then Broadcom. Fukers.

My boss said screw em, we go Proxmox. So now I live and breathe Proxmox.
PVE is a heap of janky hax, so you gotta get expert real fast.
PBS is cutting edge software that breaks twice a week, so ya gotta get expert real fast.
And now I’m an expert. Especially at PBS. DR. Site-to-site. I can do that shit.

Now that I have this new skillset, where can I use it?
Who’s using Proxmox?

  • Cait@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 days ago

    The Forums are pretty baron, we use Proxmox at our University, and we don’t have enough hours to figure everything out. Maybe you could do some good for the people out there

    • dbtng@eviltoast.orgOP
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      2 days ago

      My friend, I’ll hand out discredit where it is due, and Proxmox has a lot of issues … but the Proxmox vendor does a decent job of supporting a free product.

      https://forum.proxmox.com/

      In fact I do devote several hours every week sorting out people’s issues on the vendor’s forum.
      But they have real employees … well they are interns and a few really cranky support folks.
      And they drag the devs in to respond to stuff regularly.
      So they don’t really need my help. But I’m helping.

        • dbtng@eviltoast.orgOP
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          1 day ago

          I’m sorry. Perhaps we have a language barrier.
          If you have a specific question, please ask. I’ll either try to answer it or point you at the correct answer source.

  • Taleya@aussie.zone
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    2 days ago

    We use proxmox exclusively at work (mastering company, it underpins our aspera) and since vmware shat the bed a mate’s workplace is cutting over to pm as well (multinational). It be growin’.

    • dbtng@eviltoast.orgOP
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      2 days ago

      I love to hear this. I admit tho, I thought Proxmox would explode after VMware imploded. Proxmox did not just step into the gap left by VMware. A very large portion of IT has still never heard of Proxmox and could not tell you what its for, while they all have some passing understanding of what VMware is.

      I was hoping for a sudden swell where companies were moving ESXi > PVE en masse … and hiring engineers at high dollars. I don’t see that. :[

      • Taleya@aussie.zone
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        1 day ago

        Not gonna be a sudden swell, but there will be a raising as contracts start running out and beancounters start looking at running costs

      • JollyGreen_sasquatch@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        Many places are still looking at options, and costs of switching. Where I work still is, even though we have a large Linux server fleet already. I expect this is on a 3-5 year plan to ramp up switching to something else for most companies that are going to switch.

        • dbtng@eviltoast.orgOP
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          Perhaps this comment most addresses what was on my mind. I see comments from admins, education, small biz, homelabbers (homelabbers rule!).
          There are only a couple folks that appear to be in my tier (50 + hosts). And that’s because there arent a lot of us on proxmox.

          I think you’re right. Big enterprise moves slow. The VMwsre implosion is just now hitting corporate budgets.
          Thanks for your perspective, friend.

          • JollyGreen_sasquatch@sh.itjust.works
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            1 day ago

            We are a vdi shop too, so we have to be sure performance is at least as good. With a few other complicated setups, it is non-trivial to test alternatives.

            Migration is usually shutting down the VM, exporting it from VMware, and importing on the other side. We have some really generous maintenance windows usually(ie basically 36-48 hours every weekend) and I would still expect it to take a year to migrate everything if we went all in.

            We would be over 50 hypervisor hosts too, san connectivity, shared disks, and GPU accelerated vdi. It’s a lot to eval for each option and test it all works and figure out the caveats.

  • Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I used to use VMware religiously for software testing across several different versions at once. Had a nice stack of VM’s of our corporate software going all the way from win2000 installs to Win11. Then, we we went SaaS so all the different versions became obsolete. Regardless, if I were to do it over, it would definitely be Proxmox now. No way I’d ever willingly support Broadcom.

    • dbtng@eviltoast.orgOP
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      Broadcom stole my career. Fukem. I’ve put my bets on Proxmox.
      The PVE product needs to be ground-up replaced, but if it gets popular, they will do that.
      PBS is the future. I am on board.

  • tomkatt@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Dunno who’s using PMox in enterprise, but I’d love to see more uptake. I’m a former VMware employee and I hate what Broadcom did to it.

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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    Please tell me you didn’t switch production to Proxmox without having the proper support for skillset…

    Anyway this isn’t the best place for this. Try !sysadmin@lemmy.world

    Proxmox in general tends to be pretty solid. They key is to set it up correctly and to run in on proper hardware. My guess is that you didn’t one or both of those.

    • dbtng@eviltoast.orgOP
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      2 days ago

      You added this bit about your guesses after my first reply.
      Surely you understand how hollow and weird that sounds? You guessing about the environments that I manage? Why would you do that? Strange behavior.

    • dbtng@eviltoast.orgOP
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      2 days ago

      Hehe. Have you been to a real job? Where real things happen? The mark of a good admin is that they can do anything at all.

      Oh, we are gonna switch to 100% Docker now? Ok, I’ll get up to speed on that. Ooops, no now it all goes to Azure. Ok, dust off my Azure certs. Nope, now we are gonna put everything on this gui on top of kvm called proxmox.
      Sure, whatever. Let’s just get it done.

      • tomkatt@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        It’s not a good idea to “yes man” every ask without consideration for long term supportability.

        What you mentioned isn’t the mark of a good admin, just one with a technical skill set that doesn’t question methodology at the whims of management. This eventually leads to poor planning, large tech debt, and burnout.

        • dbtng@eviltoast.orgOP
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          If you lack the skill to make such claims, then keep company with your own doubts.
          I can build anything.

          Anything.

          • tomkatt@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            I can do the above, and what I don’t know I can figure out. I’ve been at this for a long, long time. That’s not the point. I’d be asking why migrating our infra every other week is an effective use of technical resources and how this benefits the business.

            We’re not in this industry just to play with the tech, there are actual business goals and costs to consider.

            Please take your ego down a notch.

            • dbtng@eviltoast.orgOP
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              2 days ago

              Sure. Everything you said makes sense.
              They laid off my entire infra department. My boss. The juniors.
              I’m all that’s left. So, ya see …
              (But you’re right, I’m being silly. I’ll leave it there. Remind me how silly I am next time something doesn’t work. Thx.)

              • tomkatt@lemmy.world
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                2 days ago

                Damn, sorry to hear that. Take care of yourself and remember no job is worth your health. Leave if you can. I’ve been there and I fucked off when I realized they were literally killing me (high blood sugar, long hours, and fell asleep driving home, turned in my resignation the next workday).

                • dbtng@eviltoast.orgOP
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                  Thank you so much. I was headed there. Doc caught me 2 years ago, gave me the big warning. Cut back the booze, dropped 50 pounds, started eating fiber. Now I’m just a stress case, but a darn healthy one.
                  I’m not scrambling to get a different job. I’m well paid, and good luck finding someone to do my job, so the boss takes some crap back from me. Plus, I don’t think we can do more layoffs and stay in biz. But the ceo does make bold architecture decisions.

                  Lemmy is awesome. I act like a jerk and meet people regardless.
                  Well met, friend.

  • ddh@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 days ago

    Though all the hardware has changed, I still have my first cluster from 6 years ago. First a single drive on ext4, then three workstations with ZFS mirrors, then 1L compute modules on an iSCSI SAN, back to just a virtual Proxmox server running on a NAS after paring back services (to Docker) and power (from 400W to 60W).

  • neutronbumblebee@mander.xyz
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    2 days ago

    Recently replaced a small VMware cluster with it after a long testing period. Its working well generally. We have a couple of layers of PBS and the storage backend is varied. Some hardware raid some zfs. No major complaints so far with stability or performance