I just followed their guide last week and was surprised how smooth it went. Their documentation seemed very thorough. I kinda expected a few issues, but everything worked flawlessly. Seems like they do a pretty good job of detecting most of the edge cases that would cause issues. Granted, my installation hasn’t been modified too heavily outside the norm. I think I had one or two modified config files I had to edit, but the helper script found and told me about them and how to handle it.

I had put off the upgrade for a while figuring it would be a breaking change. But it went so smoothly I’ll probably be upgrading to 9.1 pretty soon.

Quite. Its almost as though the docs are written by people who actually use it.

I was (still am sadly) a VMware consultant for about 25 years. It makes me laugh when I hear breathless "enterprise noises" with regards VMware and how PVE isn't quite ready yet.

PVE is just so easy and accommodating. It's Linux on Debian with a few nobs on. The web interface is so quick and uncluttered and simple. The clustering arrangements are superb and simple. The biggest issue for me and many like me was how to deal with iSCSI SANS (no snapshots - long story) It turns out you can pull the SSDs out of a Dell Msomething SAN and wack them into the hosts and you have a hyperconverged Ceph thingie with little effort.

VMware rapidly gets very expensive. Nowadays with Broadcom you have to fork out for the full enterprise thing to get DRS and vDS - that's auto balancing clusters and funky networking. PVE gifts you Open vSwitch support out of the box and all clusters are equal. Storage DRS (migrate virty hard discs on the fly) is free on PVE too. Oh and you get containers too on PVE - VMware Tanzu is seriously expensive.

Anyway, I could grind on about this for quite some time but in my opinion, PVE is a far better base product in general for your VMs. A vCentre is a horrendous waste of resources and the rest of VMware's appliances are pretty tubby too. I recall evaluating their first efforts at SDN with edge firewalls and so on - no thanks!