Half the industry, if not more, is already seeking alternatives to vcenter, esxi, director, and the rest of the gang. Watch the install base shrinking going forward.
We are. Where I am, the money men are (rightly) scared and we're looking at our options. I'm currently assessing Kubernetes as an alternative. The benefits to containerization are too great to ignore, but if we go that route, the workload to migrate our services is definitely going to sting for the next few months. Thanks Broadcom....
How about Proxmox? It allows containers and VMs. Containers via LXC, but you could set your own VM to run docker/kubernetes etc.
Haven't had many chances to try Kuberbetes myself, so not sure the difference of advantages.
Yeah, I use Proxmox at home and however much I love the product, it's not really enterprise ready. There are too many missing features and 3rd party integrations that come as standard with vSphere. Our future is probably in microservices. The cost saving benefits of auto scaling, while also being vendor agnostic are very attractive.
Ye ol "free" hyper-v as well. Would probably be the next one I consider in a corporate environment after VMware just blew it's brains out. Containers are great, I run kubernetes at one on truenas scale but obviously it's Linux containers which may have some implications if the idea is to move everything off VMware to containers. Like if there are windows vms.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. That's how hyperv has always been deployed. Install Microsoft server, install hyperv role. It's a hypervisor. Does all the fancy things like clustering as well, through the fail over cluster manager where you can view all your hosts, move vms from host to host, configure your witnesses etc. It absolutely is a competitor in the esxi space, never had quite all the bells and whistles but it was good enough for most applications.
The standalone Hyper-V Server was last released for server 2019. Not only was this leaner than Server 2019 w/ the Hyper V role, it was available for free.