I'm kinda hoping AI agents pass the threshold of being able to reliably do a complete production migration sometime this year. We've got a couple years left on the vmware contract, and it's just obscene what they've done, with the price hikes, degraded support, etc.

At this point they're more an enterprise scheme to maximize license profiteering for compatible software and OS "per core" licensing in conjunction with hardware platform providers. It'd be cool if the support were worth the price, but in most enterprise cases, you're going to save a lot of money if you pay enough full time staff to purchase, build, maintain, and operate a virtualization environment compared to what the enterprise platforms provide. In most cases, you'll save more than enough to keep a better specced system completely redundant with spare hardware on hand.