E (37:36)
All right, so VMware's ESXi was and still is the king of virtual machines in the data center. The end of 2023, we saw Broadcom purchasing VMware and completely ripping it down beginning in 2024, breaking off from partner channels, ending perpetual licensing, killing its pipeline by ending the free ESXI that students and hobbyists are using to get familiar with and then bring it into the world at work. You know, the path many enthusiasts and those in education, you know, you know, they bring it back to the office. Serving personally serving on a local college computer careers board. I learned that, that this college that I kind of help advise in a big group, it's not like just me, but I've learned that they're no longer even a part of the VMware Academy that they used to be in. And I assume it ain't really get into it, but I assume it's somehow related to this change. Discussions took place as to what others are doing about it in the industry because this board is made up of businesses in the area what kind of IT needs they have. So the discussion came up, you know, what are you guys doing? Are you doing anything with this? Are you replacing it? What are you replacing it with? You know, and I've seen a lot of ads and various things with, with other vendors trying to step up like Scale Computing and Canonical, trying to fill the void being left by VMware. But I think one of the strongest contenders in this space may be Proxmox, one of the closest drop ins that I've seen. As it sits today, I already, you know, I already thought Proxmox was a great drop in replacement and I didn't even realize it was missing anything. It works great in a cluster, but what about managing multiple clusters? Well, that is where the new Proxmox Data Center Manager comes in. Funny thing is, when I first saw this, this posted about Proxmox Data Center Manager, I thought it was a job posting. I clicked in, I thought maybe I could apply for a job there, but it's not. It's a piece of software to manage all your clusters and I tested it out. The first alpha was released and it doesn't add a lot to what's in place today, especially if you only have one cluster as I do. But for managing multiple clusters, this simple alpha may have features you need. Proxmox Datacenter Manager is a single pane of glass that can monitor and manage all your Proxmox clusters. You can already easily migrate VMs from end containers between servers within a cluster, but if you're managing multiple clusters, there's no way to migrate them without Proxmox Data center. Because with Proxmox Data Center Manager you can migrate systems between distinct separate clusters. So monitoring, managing or yeah, monitoring, managing all clusters at once are the key features. And I believe this may be in response to better set of Proxmox as a replacement to VMware's EXI supplying similar functionality to VMware's VCenter, which is kind of a manager for all their ESXi VSpheres. You know, for those watching, I actually have my, my Data Center Manager up 0.1.7 Alpha and you can see things such as, you know, all the remotes could be reached. Virtual nodes are. I have two online two nodes in my cluster. How many virtual machines are running, how many are stopped, how many containers are running, how many are stopped? There's access controls, certificates, administration stuff shell down at the bottom the remotes, PVE's. You could do a lot of the same things you could do when you're actually on Proxmox itself. Start, stop, clone. You can't do everything at it's, it's alpha. But like I said, one thing you can do here that you cannot do is actually migrate a VM from one Proxmox in one cluster over to another connected cluster. The roadmap shows many more management improvements planned to where I believe at some point, Proxmox clusters will be able to be completely managed within this Proxmox Data Center Manager, much like VCenter does for VMware. I'm not sure how to quantify some of my thoughts in this prediction for 2025, but I believe that Proxmox will make large gains into the enterprise Data center in 2025, especially with some of the things I've heard even before this. We may or may not be aware of these gains, but I think what we will see without being in these data centers is major improvements to the Proxmox ecosystem and Data Center Manager with, with a final release by the end of the year. So, so the measurable thing is proxmox Data Center Manager having its first final release. That might be a stretch being only an alpha now, but it gives them a year and, you know, we'll see where it's at. I also wonder if, you know, if the alpha release of Proxmox Data center, you know, starting to develop this has anything to do with possibly new money that's maybe already being injected into, into Proxmox, you know, maybe, you know, they've had a whole year to start thinking about where do you want to go. And you know, I've heard a lot of talk about people going to, to Proxmox and if you're in the enterprise, they have paid support just like vcenter. So it's not like you're completely all on your own. You can pay for the support, you can get their service, you can set that up in your data center. It's really out of, out of the things I know, probably the path I would like to recommend and push going forward and you know, maybe others already are. Maybe people are buying that support and maybe they have some new money. I don't know if there's somewhere to look up if they have that somewhere. But that might be a good sign. New products coming out might be a good sign for Proxmox this year.
