Yeah, vsphere has a mile-long list of enterprise checkbox features that the sales managers can overwhelm the CIO's with on the golf course.

Kubernetes might have success, but AFAICS Kubernetes also sort of involves a new way of architecting applications (cloud native applications, 12-factor apps, microservices, etc.; whatever the buzzword du jour is). The idea with vmware was always to virtualize all those zillions of more or less idling physical servers, and get some snazzy management GUI to handle them all etc. etc.

Rearchitecting for containers is indeed a lot more effort and, indeed, one of the reasons for VMware's success was that it provided more efficiency without (at least initially) much in the way of operational changes.

But kuvevirt with Kubernetes does much of the same, especially for companies that are--or know they will--move to containerized workloads anyway.