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Ballast

Broadcom's VMware licensing changes are pushing SMBs to look elsewhere

The SMB alternative to VMware and vCentre, built on Hyper-V.

Ballast is a control plane and distributed agent for Hyper-V hosts and failover clusters — a cohesive orchestration layer that does for Hyper-V what vCentre does for vSphere, minus the licensing model that just changed under you.

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Community tier is free. No account required to read the docs.

Built to keep working when it's offline

The centre-dependency model works until the centre is the problem. Ballast's agent holds a durable, last-honoured copy of its own desired state and never invents intent — it just keeps enforcing what it was told, whether or not anything is watching.

Centralised model (vCentre)
Ballast
When the centre goes offline
Management is unavailable. Hosts keep running whatever they were last configured to run, but nothing new can be declared or corrected.
Each host's agent keeps enforcing its own last-honoured desired state — the same idempotent reconcile loop, just without a controller watching. The console shows it as Autonomous, not degraded.
Where desired state lives
Centrally, in the management plane. A host has no independent memory of its intended configuration.
Both centrally and cached on every host. Losing the centre never changes intent — only the ability to change it further.
Reconnecting after an outage
Manual reconciliation — comparing what happened while disconnected against what should be true.
Automatic. The agent reports its ObservedGeneration, drift is detected against the current desired state, and the centre resumes from there.
Settled Progressing Degraded AUTO Autonomous (centre offline) — deliberately not the "all is well" colour
A host settled at its current generation — reconcile steps, agent version and certificate status all reported per host, not inferred.

What it does

Build clusters from scratch

Declare hosts, storage and a witness, and Ballast coordinates with Windows Failover Clustering to bring the cluster up — no hand-run PowerShell sequence to keep in sync with reality.

Manage ROBO sites from one pane of glass

A remote-office host or a two-node cluster appears in the same fabric-wide host list as the main datacentre cluster — one table, not a separate console per site.

Cross-cluster replication

A VM's replica shows up next to it, not in a separate tool — running/replicating state, target cluster and node, and which replicas have no live relationship and need attention.

DR runbooks

A runbook is the order your site comes back in: directory and DNS first, the databases that need them next, then the applications on top — one tier at a time, never forty VMs booting at once.

Templates

Capture a powered-off VM as a template — hardware profile, guest customisation and a generalised disk image — and deploy it repeatably anywhere the centre reaches.

VMware-to-Hyper-V migration

Register a VMware source, scan what it holds, and import a VM in a few clicks, with the console naming what needs attention — a raw device mapping, a blocked disk — rather than leaving you to work it out from a failed cmdlet.

Console access, from the browser

Every VM and every host has an interactive console reachable straight from the centre — no client to install, no separate jump box. A host's console is clearly marked as affecting every guest on it, not just one.

Pricing

Ballast is free to run today. A paid tier for larger fleets and organisations is planned; nothing you deploy now under the community tier gets rug-pulled by it later.

Available now

Community

Free

  • The full centre and agent
  • Unlimited hosts and clusters
  • Desired-state reconciliation, drift detection, autonomy
  • Cross-cluster replication and DR runbooks
  • Community support (GitHub issues and discussions)
Get started on GitHub

Coming later

Team / Enterprise

Pricing TBC

  • SSO and role-based access control at scale
  • Multi-site fleet management and reporting
  • Vendor support with an SLA
  • Priority input into the roadmap

Steady on its last-honoured state. Even offline.

Ballast is open and free to run today. Come look at the code, file an issue, or join the discussion.

GitHubCommunity discussionsRead the docs