Best practise - UCS VMM or ProxMox for 4-5 Windows servers

UCS - Univention Corporate Server
#1

Hello friends,

I have been asked to mirgrate an existing (but way to slow) ESXi setup to UCS.
Setup contains of one Windows AD for ~20 users, Group Policies for several things including MS Office, DNS/DHCP for ~150 devices, plus 4 Windows 7/10 VMs running some proprietry software we cannot replace with FOSS.
Hardware: hp Server with 2x Xeon, 256GB RAM, 5x hp-HDs as RAID-5.
Fileserver is a separate Linux/Samba box autheticating against AD which we like to keep.

I understand UCS has virtual machine managment, so while ProxMox sounds pretty promising (migration/backup of VMs to hot standby hardware, integrated Firewall) I wonder if it is worth the extra complexity (like to keep it as simple as possible)?

As a side question: is there a way to migrate existing ESXi (non-AD-) VMs to UCS
VMs?

Thanks in advance!

(Sorry if this has been asked before, I couldn’t find any posting in the forums.)

#2

I run all our servers as VMs under ProxMox. That includes UCS. I personally would not run a bunch of VMs under UCS as I don’t really think that’s it’s purpose. I would imagine you will find the experience of managing VMs to be noticeably better in ProxMox. I could be wrong though as I dismissed the idea of running VMs in UCS pretty quickly and have never done it for any length of time.

1 Like
#3

IMHO Proxmox is easy to setup, reliable and has features UVMM is missing. I would recommend to go with Proxmox instead of UVMM.

1 Like
#4

But the question was “how-to-do-it”.
Moving linux VM from one Virtualisation-host to an other.
I would suggest REAR “apt install rear” and you need an
temporary SAMBA-FileShare to park the images. Feel free to ask!
Why not move from ESXi to ESXi? Its much easier. And put an SSD into the new system.
(or put it into the old one, and move the VMS onto… And it runs much faster. :wink:

Jottschi

#5

Hi,

as @Kevo already mentioned- you can use UCS as hypervisor. But it is only suitable for small deployments, to be honest.
In long terms you will be better with one of the other two (Proxmoxx and ESXi). UCS itself will run as a VM on both flawlessly.

As you are currently using ESXi (I assume it is to slow because of outdated hardware!) and you will get a new server I do not see a reason why not to stay on ESXi… why to migrate? Are there any hughe advantages of Proxmoxx to ESXi?

Anyways, I guess this is not the right forum to discuss ESXi vs. Proxmoxx.

/Cv

#6

Thanks for your replies!
I’ll give ProxMox a try.

@Christian_Voelker thank you very much for confirming UCS runs well with ProxMox. I was a little worried about that.

Although indeed of topic here, asince you asked and as a final note;
We are not going to replace hardware. 256GB memory and 2x Xeon schould be sufficient. I cannot add SSD to the hp server as a) hp is very picky about accepted harddisk and b) we already have hardware RAID5 with hightspeed SAS harddisk.
I’m moving away from ESXi because (as a 20+ years unix/linux admin) it’s a pain to have to boot up a Windows maschine and make sure I have matching vmware managment software installed to manage my VMs. Plus, once you’re used to apt or similar, updateing ESXi is not much fun. While looking for potential known issues I found various reports about sluggish ESXi performance compared to other hypervisors. Maybe it’s not doing well with RAID5 or the particular server, but as long as I have (FOSS) alternatives I’d rather go that way :wink:

Thanks again!

#7

some hughe advantages for proxmox against vmware is - no need of vcenter server to manage cluster, cheaper license when you want live vm migration (vmotion in vmware)
and now there comes up a new backup server from proxmox (currently in beta - but still works verry well with integrated dedup and changed block tracking backup incremental for ever)

rg
Christian

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