Worked in a related field, where I interfaced with a lot of enterprise VMware VDI teams.

... to put it delicately, why do corporate VDI management teams always have such terrible ops practices?

I have literally never run into one that even does things like proactive utilization and response time monitoring.

I think it’s usually due to those being seen as a cost with low expectations. As long as people can work, they’ll be low-priority and they almost certainly don’t have competitive salaries or career paths to keep top people.

I think for similar reasons that backups and regular server maintenance languishes: "it's working, I don't need to do anything." until something goes wrong. Then they're multiple versions out of date, or have no backup, or have half their VM's showing awful performance then wonder where things went wrong.

Apathetic engineers is often the problem. Just as often, though, they aren't given the people, tools, or budget.

Non tech companies see tech refresh and upkeep as a pool from which to steal people or dollars for other stuff. Until something breaks in a way that it hurts the business.

Agreed, apathy often comes from above, resulting in no budget or priority for engineers who do see the writing on the wall.

Ditto on the VCP5 - both Datacenter and Cloud. It has been interesting to watch VMware evolve from hypervisor to software-defined and now on to this partnership with Google - really smart move to battle Microsoft.