[panick21_]

Does VMWare software do much more then VM handling? Is there something extra they provide to make it worth paying that much? I have only ever worked a little with the free product.

Also, what are the alternatives proprietary and open? And what are those solutions missing? Hopefully this is good news for the open project, getting more commercial support and more users.

Also sounds like good news for people like Oxide. If costumers are already considering leaving VMWare and need to do a lot of software changes, they might be willing to make a larger step for new hardware as well.

[rwmj]

Depends what you mean by "more than VM handling". VMware handles everything you could possibly think to do with VMs and many you probably never thought about. For example: Scripted live migration. Single click to deploy a test network of VMs. Virtual desktops. Wrap up a VM in a single file that can be "played" remotely. Scan all your VMs for vulnerabilities.

Beyond VMs they attempted to branch out into containers with a version of Kubernetes (VMware Tanzu) which I believe didn't get many sales.

The competition are roughly:

- All the cloud providers

- oVirt (formerly Red Hat's RHV, probably the closest thing to vSphere in terms of UI and deployment)

- Kubenetes + Kubevirt

- Openstack, probably

- Virtuozzo

- Virtual Box

- Proxmox

- Nutanix

- Single node installations using things like virt-install

- Rolling your own management on top of KVM or Xen (surprisingly popular but I wouldn't recommend it myself)