I’ll tack on just a bit from here, and maybe someone can correct me if I am wrong.
VMware’s HCI clustering is far better than proxmox + ceph/other.
VMware’s NSX network virtualization enables their fancy HCX site orchestration.
Even without NSX/HCX, Site Recovery Manager makes for a slick redundancy/fail over option.
VMware’s EUC option, Horizon, beats the absolute pants off of Citrix. And that was Citrix’s whole game.
The vGPU option first lived in EUC, but turns out scalable GPU sharing is just plain useful.
And then there is the orchestration management, allowing for power savings, automatic balancing, and more.
Basically, every high level solution they had on their platform was without a true parallel, and was built on a rock solid foundation. Even if their support is shit(it is), the platform is so ubiquitous and approachable that you could just use their support as an insurance of sorts, and it gave upgrade rights through the years.
Broadcom knows who uses those high level features, and knows they’re stuck. Our options are a full cloud migration, loss of features, or pay up. They’ll disregard every customer small enough to not need any of that, and they will milk every customer that’s too big to go anywhere else.
If you’re one of the small folks, I’d say look into proxmox, openstack, xcp-ng, or have a path to cloud in mind. If you’re one of the big folks, I recommend Balvenie, Macallan, or Johnnie Walker, cause you might as well enjoy a good drink if you’re gonna get fucked.