 time here for more systems is December of 2023 and the Broadcom acquisition of VMware is going exactly as we expected it to. Let's talk about some alternatives out there. I won't really address Hyper-V in any depth because I just don't think it's a great product. I've never thought it was a great product. If you want to argue with me in the comments feel free, but Microsoft has also decided to discontinue the free version of Hyper-V and because they don't have the resources allegedly according to their forum post and reality is a company worth almost three trillion dollars doesn't want to put the resources into it, which really tells me the roadmap is just charging more for it. So let's talk about a better, more stable alternative option such as XCPNG and Proxmox. Now let's start with Proxmox and I know it's one of the most popular ones out there for the HomeLab people. I have run some polls in my forums and absolutely Proxmox comes out on top for the HomeLab use. We know it's used in business. We just don't run into it very often and sometimes when we do it's because people have tinkered with it too much. So the reason the HomeLab people love it is also sometimes the problem when we've seen supporting it of well all these weird customizations you did because it's just Debbie and underneath with KVM. You can do a lot of customizations doesn't mean you always should. That's not a really a dig at Proxmox. It's actually probably why the HomeLab people like it so much. Now if you just load Proxmox straight and do the paid version and get these stable updates I think Proxmox is actually a pretty solid choice. I've not seen any of the Proxmox system scale as big as XCPNG but there's another reason I don't see it in business often and that comes down to the way they license it and the way they do their support. And basically their support is limited to office hours in Germany during normal business hours. They have a response time but there's no real SLA to get it escalated very fast or Proxmox. So it kind of makes it a little bit less attractive for businesses looking for a solid support option with a subscription. Now this is where I come back to XCPNG and Zen Orchestra. Fully open source all features great for people who want to use it in the HomeLab and I've done some videos on how it works the architecture of it and it's actually formatted in a way more like how VMware works. XCPNG is very similar to ESXi and Zen Orchestra is similar to vSphere because Zen Orchestra is an orchestration tool that can manage many instances of XCPNG. It can manage many instances of XCPNG grouped together into resource pools and then it can also manage multiple resource pools with a single instance of XO. Now they did this for scalability and I don't talk about scalability from the point of well they say they can handle X number of VMs or X number of hosts but we have actually done a lot of consulting with many many clients you can also spend time in the forums that they have and see that yes there's some very large-scale thousands of VMs that we have managed with clients and done large-scale migrations off of VMware and their orchestration tool makes managing things at scale really easy combine that with a integrated backup that comes with it and all of this is open source and free but back to the support question what about 24 seven support options with one hour response time they have that too the team at vates behind XCPNG and XO just released here in December their new bundled pricing and they're still coming out with some more small business pricing and maybe available by the time you watch in this video you'll find that linked down below with their support packages and the way their bundles work but this does include people looking for enterprise level support and their support has been absolutely amazing and we are recommending XCPNG as an alternative to a lot of people because of that support because of the quality of the code and because it's been extremely stable with the updates even if you don't have a license if you are just using this in your home lab the updates are extremely easy to load and have never caused me any problems i started with the seven versions of zen moved into the eight version and pretty soon here we're going to have 8.3 i believe it's going to be pretty soon we'll have a full version of that their current release stable here in december 2023 is 8.2 but the updates for that have now included quite a few updated drivers for things and once again you don't have to pay a subscription to get the stable versions of it this is just something that comes with it even if you're using the open source one so zen is what we've been recommending to many of our clients and i think it's a solid choice i have a whole playlist talking about all the features and architecture of zen i'm a little bit less versed in proxmox but i will link towards my friends videos that have whole tutorials on things like proxmox how to get started with it how to set it up both jeff at craft computing and jay from learn links tv have a great series if you're looking to learn more on that so i still think it's a good option and i do realize it's going to be probably more popular in the homelab especially because of the tinkering that you can do but if you're looking for a business use case with support and 24 seven response that is going to be something you want to look at from the vates team at xcpng love hearing from all of you let me know what you think is the right alternative to this and what might be a good solution for you love hearing of the other ideas you may have leave them in the comments down below like and subscribe if you want to see more content from this channel and i'll see you over in the forums thanks