red hat virt is being deprecated soon, to be replaced by ovirt which is def not prod ready
Not exactly. oVirt is the upstream open source project that Red Hat Virtualization was based on. It is never and will never be “production ready.” Because they don’t sell support for it.
Red Hat does not have a replacement for RHV. You can use OpenShift Virtualization to make virtual machines, but it’s not designed to be a replacement for RHV or a competitor to VMware. It is designed to be a stepping stone for people looking to containerize their workloads or keep that one legacy app around that can’t be containerized. You might be better served by OpenStack, but that’s an entire cloud orchestration tool, and the next version will require OpenShift to host the control plane.
Nutanix is probably the best competitor to VMware. Proxmox is another solution that would be great for small to medium businesses. SUSE’s Rancher team is working on Harvester, which could become something that competes. Honestly, there isn’t a lot of competition in this market because it’s not where growth is. People are moving to containers and kubernetes. Even VMware knows it and they are playing catch up with Tanzu.