I wonder who vSphere users can even go to

We're definitely seeing an uptick in interest for Triton Datacenter[1] from vSphere users looking for alternatives.

Aside from Triton, there's a quite a bit of interest in Proxmox and XCP-ng in the community.

While alternatives are gaining popularity, they certainly do not have the same ecosystem that VMware users are accustomed to. Organizations are going to have to pony up, or make concessions.

[1]: https://www.tritondatacenter.com

I loved spotting the .joyent directory on one of the screenshots.

Some things live on!

They probably need a therapist at this point. They've been through a lot over the years.

I'm sorry, what better interface is there for massive amounts of VM management in a GUI?

Backstage or ServiceNow in front of kubevirt

There is also Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager and Azure Stack that might be an alternative for companies that ran Windows on their vSphere environment. I've seen Windows shops already switch to that because the licensing a lot cheaper.

There's also Nutanix, RedHat and other options that people have mentioned here.

> RedHat

Unfortunately post-IBM aquisition, Red Hat's closest equivalent (RHEV) was killed off. You've got OpenStack and k8s VMs now, neither of which are really what people running VMWare are looking for I suspect.

Funny part is IBM is one of the largest users of VMWare and IBM cloud is based on Ubuntu .

Proxmox? (I appreciate that this is a significant change)

I see Proxmox like an alterative to ESXi rather than vSphere. I'll either go xcp-ng with Xen Orchestra or Nutanix as an alternative to vSphere.

Nutanix

HPE is after Nutanix. I dread the day HP buys Nutanix

Xen Orchestra is another alternative.

But the issue with this and Proxmox is vsphere is not just the web interface.

Usually a company has Veeam integration for backups, and server creation/decom automations all built on the vmware platforms...

Xcp-ng has built in backups that can be done in continuous 15 min increments or more traditionally if you like.

Proxmox offers a free "Backup OS" that you can install on a host to backup your proxmox servers.

No Veeam, but they noth have this covered.

Both AWS and Azure have migration agnets for vShere VMs

"Lift and Shift" cloud VMs is going to be MORE expensive than on-prem.

Sure you CAN do it but not advisable.

Apache CloudStack.

It supports multiple hypervisors including VMWare, KVM, XCP-ng, etc. I haven't tried but it has some features to allow users to migrate from VMWare to Apache CloudStack with KVM and/or XCP-ng.

Nutanix has a really nice product. They’re going to win a lot of business.