 Let's talk about XCP and G versus VMware and we're going to bring up Proxmox as well as people Kind of come down to these choices a lot for their lab environments that they're setting up Whether it be at their home or at their business and a lot of IT departments in or even IT companies like myself We have labs set up because we want to test out software test out new products and find out what works and what doesn't work And especially for us because we're staging sometimes we're doing proof of concepts for a solution We may be deploying these labs are very important and a lot of home users This is very accessible software because the two products that I'm really talking about here Proxmox and XCP and G Both fully GPL license and you can download and have the whole full product suite for free I'm going to compare them though to VMware ESXi because it's something that is huge in the market Everyone's very familiar with it. If you in the enterprise market, it's pretty much in most major companies But it's not free. It is enterprise grade. It's a not a bad product It is expensive to license. They do have some free basic versions with some limitations on and it's not open source, but If your goal or you're working towards a job not as much worried about the lab that you plan to be a VMware admin Or you know, we'll throw in hyper V if you're going into a job place and you want to get certifications for those Well, then you probably shouldn't be running XCP and G or Proxmox unless you want to do it on the side Proxmox are able to run in corporate environments But sometimes you have to get jobs in corporate environments where you don't get to make that decision So yeah, in that case just run whatever you plan to get certified in or job in so you can be fair with it that pushed aside My business we have chose XCP and G as what we want to run things on I took a look at Proxmox I like it and I have nothing bad to say about Proxmox. It's just the way We went with and once you build everything on it I don't know you get lazy and don't want to say move it all over and I don't have a compelling reason to move it over I think Proxmox has a good product Let's talk about the features of them And we're going to also at the same time and throw in the features of VMware Like I said, it's because a lot of people know it and these folks at XCP and G made this handy little comparison chart Is that's really who they see their competitor as? People already running the older Citrix version of this because this is zen server Then there was a Citrix version Citrix made some poor decisions and lost the market to the XCP and G Which is an open source and can be installed over the top of the Citrix version of zen server And I believe Citrix has recently done some renaming as of here in April 2019. I'm not going to get into that Now when you're doing these comparisons, there's two columns over here and one here And the reason why is because XCP and G is the base zen orchestra is technically a separate product Same developers are developing both products and XCP and G does not itself have a web interface XCP and G is a base command line driven when you start VM hypervisor here So it works much like other hypervisor works like Proxmox But the web interface is set separate now There is a tool it is a windows based tool and it allows you to manage it from A council so there's ways to manage it or is a GUI management tool It doesn't work very well in Linux, but you can run that and you can run XCP and G without zen orchestra The reason zen orchestra is a separate product as opposed to being integrated when that's sometimes where people don't like zen server is Management now I say management because of course, yeah, we want to manage the web interface But how you manage it at scale? I have some clients we've met through doing some consulting And through these videos and zen orchestra offers A amazing ability to handle thousands of VMs across even hundreds of these XCP and G servers And I say that because I have a client for example that their head office is in chicago But they have data centers in multiple locations zen orchestra web interface runs independently at the chicago But then connects over vpn to all the XCP and G servers at the other data centers Now these XCP and G servers can be complete standalone and then everything's orchestrated through one web interface As opposed to logging into each one individually and proxmox solves that by doing a cluster So we cluster them together But what proxmox doesn't solve if I have a cluster in chicago and I have a cluster in Dallas and I there are two separate clusters. I'd have two separate web interfaces The way XCP and G with zen orchestra works is zen orchestra loaded at one can add another cluster from the management side Matter of fact, you can have multiple installs of zen orchestra at multiple locations managing multiple locations of XCP and G because it's pulling and writing back the config to each of these and when it connects to them it's also able to move the data back and forth between the Nodes of XCP and G even if they don't know each other the only way they know each other is via zen orchestra So it's a little bit of a different concept, but it scales to very large scale Thousands of them had spent some time in the forums You can see there's some very large companies running this and very large installs of this being run on XCP and G was in orchestra But they also have the same features once you get past that Basic vm admin live vm migration live vdm migration high availability We go down here and this goes back to proxmox proxmox has these features too So when I say all of them I do mean all the different ones we're talking about here So proxmox xcp and g zen orchestra Hyper conversion solution. Do you have vSAN? They have xosan xosan is an exception to the Fully open source part of it for some of their hyper conversion. I believe that is only a paid feature So if you have a need for their xosan product, I'm not going to get a detail on it That is the exception to not being gpl So everything xcp and g and zen orchestra is gpl Proxmox fully gpl But that is a paid tool for any of that Automatic updates tool updates. Yes, you can do automatic updates and tool updates as well in here. So all all those things are same Health checking ACLs and access control Yes, once again, zen orchestra has a lot of those things the scheduled tasks is really slick and zen orchestra You can schedule vdi tasks I don't think proxmox has that as a feature in their web interface that i'm aware of but It's all run on a linux back end a devian back end So you can still use chron to schedule things so it can be done But there's certain things you may not find in the proxmox. I'm not an expert on it I'd actually defer over to j at learn linux tv has a series of tutorials on proxmox But that's kind of an edge case if you have like these, you know scheduled tasks that you want to do Now basic backup. Yes, they all support it This is where zen orchestra really shines delta backup file level restore continuous replication and load balancing This is something that yes, there's kind of a basic backup and restore But when you get into the way it works in xcpng with zen orchestra, you can actually create like a job With their backup system that continuously replicates that vdi to even another xcpng server So you can say every half hour give me the delta syncing Just over to this other server so you can have two vdi's that are It parity with each other based on that replication. That's actually a really nice feature If you need that really granular level backups to do things and it can keep our visions of them So you can actually go back and easily jump backwards and go I just want to restore Two hours ago vm because of something that happened or make some type of comparison It happens very very fast in zen orchestra Because of this continuous replication and this continuous replication And delta backups because it's only syncing the deltas you can create one large copy the first time And you're only syncing the delta changes between the vdi's This can be done over a lower bandwidth connection to have an offsite backup of your data So it's not just exporting the whole vm or moving it around It's just synchronizing that slight change for each one really slick feature for doing backups on there I'm not as clear that proxmox has that I've looked when I looked at it that was one feature I noticed it just doesn't seem to have it can fully backup restore vm's But can't do that really slight granular restore of those So that is where I'm going to lean towards xcpng and if i'm wrong someone correct me But I haven't seen that feature inside of there Now something where proxmox really does shine is they have sef fs nfs cfs and gluster As other storage types in here This does go above and beyond the storage availability that you find with xcpng xcpng supports ext3 lvm ext4 Really kind of beta. I've seen some people Setting up zfs in there, but it's not it is not natively supported So it's but it's open source. You can obviously Load packages and modify things if you wanted to go there, but that's not native support For there that is an advantage that you can build this granted. It's zfs on debbie and so there's That which means it may not be the same as zfs as far as features go that you'll find on free bsd But it is available, but both proxmox vmware And xcpng all support ice cozy external storage and in a case of us We're using we've used ice cozy on one server another server using nfs and are both supported on all these platforms Where you can take and export and use an external storage server Like I said nfs or ice cozy and be able to mount that as your storage repository for the nodes So that is completely supported a couple other notices that are supported in both of these if you need the Linux containers the lxc containers that's natively supported right in the menu for Proxmox, it's a little bit more complicated because you have to have a vm to host all the containers in xcpng And then it gets its integration. So it's not at the xcpng level It's with any vm that you manage all the containers. So it's a slightly different of how it's done The kvm hypervisors which used inside of proxmox Versus this is using the zen hypervisor There's some confusion that comes back and forth with this And there's an article about the amazon switching over and getting rid of uh zen as their court They use a very custom version of zen. They're looking at a very custom version. I believe with the kvm But they're split because the majority of the aws infrastructure still runs in that I see people share that article all the time because the headline You makes it imply that they're completely switching aws completely different animal and they're not running basic tools like this They're highly customized. So it's not really relevant to any of this discussion But I bring it up because someone always mentions that it's going away or this is dying matter of fact Go to the forums. This is expanding because of the open source on here Now A couple other things here that i'll mention both these companies both proxmox and xcpng We'll actually pull up the website here cpng.com They both support Contracts so you can go here. You can get pricing You can get your standard host ssh support six tickets per year one business day response time enterprise Proxmox does the same thing both of these companies have a business model of their software is fully gpl fully free But If you would like to buy support you can and I really like this business model And I recommend buying support if it's something you need or something you want to Explore using in your enterprise environment for your business You have support options out there. So I have a lot of videos on how to get started on xcpng But if you go, you know, I want that little bit of confidence that when I sell it to management that hey, who's going to be able to support this The support comes from the people that wrote the software They're wicked smart at this because they wrote it And they said you have the same thing with proxmox if we go over here And they have subscription plans that you can buy same concept you get the software fully for free They have a number of tickets you get depending on the different Options ui, but both of them have this as an option. So there's there's not any trickery You don't get any better version if you pay you get the full version Now zen orchestra is a little bit different. So this is xcpng slash zen orchestra But when you're getting zen orchestra, if you compile it from source You're on your own they sell subscriptions to zen orchestra as a supported product So it's the same version the only couple little you get a couple things like the xosan and things like that are some of the paid things that the The only thing that's missing from the x the code, but without xosan you can still Connect to tell the servers you can still do pretty much all the things you need to do It's just that specific xosan module that's proprietary as of right now and not open source So hopefully this helps a little like I said, it's it's can be Back and forth on the choices here. I went with xcpng because I like it and you know But I don't have any problems with proxmox. I think it's an excellent product My friend who runs it they they're using it within their business And I've touched with a few other people that are that have quite a few systems running on proxmox And they they sing its praises of how good it works the same way I sing its praises of xcpng So there are two great products out there I hopefully this helps a little bit with the choices Or maybe it hurts because you wanted me to really lean one or the other Other than me being biased because I've been running xcpng and promoting it for a while I don't have any problem with proxmox But I also don't have in case you're wondering I don't have a comparison of speed between each of them one day I hope to do that when I find the time take a server run a series of tests on it running proxmox wipe the server Run a series of tests on it run xcpng and see which one's faster. I'm curious about that Any video I found or information on this seems a little Old or dated and obviously with each iteration, especially if it's been a couple years There's been major kernel updates and major changes to both of these products over the years So anything done even a year ago compared to now might not be all that informative or accurate because both these companies are very active on all their updates and very active and all support because well hyper all this Virtualization is huge. It's how a lot of these things run virtualization Granted founded by the folks of vmware, but really in the open source rule is being dominated by the xcpng And proxmox world now I do know that there's a couple of final mentions here that you can use Hype virtualization like manually you can roll your own you can load over there's all kinds of other stuff Like I said, it just goes on this beyond the scope of it I know there's a whole lot of other things out there And I know unraid supports it and free nas supports it But I don't feel as those are as developed as Some of these are right here In terms of a full stack that works really well for doing it. All right. Hopefully this helps or hurts Helps at least inform you about these two products and I'll leave links to these Data sheets and things that I found on here so you can look at them yourself, of course And it's just their websites xcpng.org and proxmox. So all right. Thanks Thanks for watching If you like this video give it a thumbs up if you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content Hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe youtube will send you a notice when we post If you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video head over to laurance systems.com Where we offer both business it services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you I want to throw at us Also, if you want to carry on the discussion further head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can keep the conversation going And if you want to help the channel out in other ways we offer affiliate links below Which offer discounts for you in a small cut for us that does help fund this channel And once again, thanks again for watching this video and see you next time