Talking to midmarket and enterprise customers and nobody is taking Proxmox seriously quite yet, I think due to concerns around support availability and long term viability. Hyper-V and Azure Local come up a lot in these conversations if you run a lot of Windows (Healthcare in the US is nearly entirely Windows based). Have some folks kicking tires on OpenShift, which is a HEAVY lift and not much less expensive than modern Broadcom licenses.

My personal dark horse favorite right now is HPE VM Essentials. HPE has a terrible track record of being awesome at enterprise software, but their support org is solid and the solution checks a heck of a lot of boxes, including broad support for non-HPE servers, storage, and networking. Solution is priced to move and I expect HPE smells blood in these waters, they're clearly dumping a lot of development resources into the product in this past year.

Interesting. Does Incus has support for storing virtual machine assets in a NFS store so they could be easily migrated?

Proxmox is free, too.

Incus looks nice, though it looks to be more API driven , at least from the landing page. I can't attest to Proxmox in a production/cluster environment but (barring GPU passthrough) it's very accessible for homelab and small network.

Proxmox is entirely free and very, very reliable. Personal preference is fine, but I really don't think any of your claims are true.

I’ve been looking at incus, and some aspects are appealing (creating a vm/container via cli). But I think proxmox having better clustering, and built in support for ceph, backups (with proxmox backup server)… proxmox just had a little more maturity behind it. I’ll be watching incus though.

I tried demo'ing Incus from their "Try it online" page but it just spins endlessly and nothing happens.

I was looking to setup Proxmox for my homelab soon but this comment got me interested in Incus. Mostly because I've never heard of any Proxmox alternatives before this. You can try out Incus in your browser here: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/try-it/

The demo does take ~10m to get into a working instance.

Dang it! I’ve just got comfortable with Proxmox, but now I have to start looking into Incus because of your comment.

For many folk's workflows, I'd wager that hypervisors are there and ready. I had a nice time setting up xcp-ng before deciding microk8s fits my needs more betterer; they're just plum good, well documented, and blazing fast.

VMware has been so good and reasonably priced for so long that there hasn't been a competitive market in the enterprise virtualization space for the past two decades. In a way, I think Broadcom's moves here might be healthy for the enterprise datacenter longer term, it has created the opportunity for others to step in and broadened the ecosystem significantly.

What do you find wrong with "this new world"? For context, I'm using their free offering for my home server, for 6-7 years now. Happy as a clam.

Funny enough, Proxmox VE is 17 years old. I want to say it was ballpark 13-14 years ago I was using it to replace ESXi to get features (HA/Live migration) that only came with expensive licensing. 15-20 years ago there were definitely companies doing exactly this.