[bluGill]

No direct replacements, but there are a lot of options. Some of the options are with a different company that would be glad to find out what parts of vSphere you need and for a price (which might or might not be reasonable) make just those for your. Some are open source and you can hire someone to add the features you need. Some are things like AWS where are completely different in many ways and yet have tools that by nature are very different forcing to change to their model, but may be better once you pay that price. And of course nothing says you can't pick multiple from the above - but no matter what it will be significant effort to move to any of them above the cost, which is what Broadcom is counting on.

[bongodongobob]

I really don't think it's necessarily "hard", it's just going to consume some time and planning. If Broadcom is actually banking on that, they're mistaken. I work for a very large multi billion dollar company and they want 3x our current costs. We told them to get fucked and we are moving. We didn't even try to negotiate, we essentially laughed at them. I got to be a fly on the wall for the call and it was hilarious.