The Microsoft-focused IT company I've effectively replaced was incredibly condescending about our decision to change direction, after their entire stack fell apart during the cyberattack last December.

I think there are going to be a lot of stubborn, highly certified IT professionals who'll have to accept that there's more than one way to build reliable infrastructure.

Apparently, I shouldn't be using Proxmox because "it's only for labs."

Meanwhile, I'm building an infrastructure that's more resilient, easier to recover and designed to keep the business operational even if we're attacked again. If that means temporarily running critical services on a cluster of ten Dell Wyse thin clients, so be it.

I'd rather have a flexible, recoverable infrastructure than an expensive stack of enterprise products that looks impressive on paper but falls over when it matters.

Makes sense... Broadcom really are speedrunning the destruction of the VMware brand, and Proxmox VE and xcp-ng are reaping the benefits.

Some major changes Broadcom has made to VMware licensing are that they've killed off perpetual licenses, and subscriptions are now billed per CPU core rather than per socket. They enforce a 16-core minimum, and were trying to increase that to a 72-core minimum (but rolled that back). Competitors with enterprise support plans, like Proxmox VE, still bill per socket.

That and all the features in Proxmox VE are free (both in cost and in free software). A company has to pay a license for all their VMware servers, whereas with Proxmox they can decide to only pay for enterprise support for production servers, while using the free version for dev/test/staging environments that don't need stability or SLAs.

They don't want small (read: less than half a DC worth of hypervisors) customers anymore. This is intentional.

Apparently, I shouldn't be using Proxmox because "it's only for labs."

Corporates (and other larger orgs) are funny in this regard. In some ways they are very conservative and slow moving, and will resist other technology even if it's clearly better.

Then, a buzzword becomes popular and "we're a first company!" and you MUST be doing . Then that buzzword becomes forgotten, and with zero mention at all to anyone. Everyone just agrees. We're no longer an anything first company.

The really boned people are SMB.

They don't have the finances to spend on switching to Proxmox or XCP, but the VMware licensing is killing them.

May as well pay for hardware as VMware licensing.

It makes sense from a business perspective... Earning the same amount of revenue from a smaller number of clients reduces their overheads like support costs, marketing costs, etc. and thus increases their profit margin.

It just sucks for companies that have to spend a lot of time and effort migrating away.

It's also risky because with fewer clients, each lost client is a bigger hit to the bottom line.

But they can't really use the dev/test environment for validation because the repositories are different.
For VMs? Probably doesnt matter.

Besides that: PVE rocks!

They have even less money for new hardware.
MSPs (like my employers) will just do it while migrating for windows server in-place upgrades.
Two flies amd so on. Company is down anyway. And we have the hardware to do conversions between hypervisors temporarily.