Aw, a corporation upset when another corporation does the kind of shit that corporations tend to do with regular people, thanks to the years and years of corporate lobbying allowing corporations to do whatever the fuck they want.
my previous employer was at work scripting their own workarounds for stuff like DRS and distributed switches so they could drop down to the standard licenses.
I used to work for a major telecoms compass until recently, working on their VMWare stack and to say they are a major customer of VMWare is to put it mildly. The cost for VMWare has skyrocketed after the Broadcom deal, so while the team were gearing up for the next gen system utilising more tools from the ESXi stack, now that's entirely abandoned and instead they're tooling up to replace it. That's over 500,000 VMs across a dozen or so datacenters. Broadcom's actions may make them a lot of money in the next few years as their customers are forced to pay this huge hike, but it won't last for long.
My work has used Nutanix since 2012, which is expensive but has been super reliable and was a game changer when they came out years ago. You can load whatever hypervisor and we continued to use VMware for years because “industry standard”. Almost two years ago I realized we could save a ton of money if we just migrated to Acropolis HV, which is their in-house solution that just puts a fancy web interface over KVM. It has been super solid and works basically the same.
Broadcom buys VMware and I end up looking like Nostradamus. It was just lucky timing.
When we are up for renewal I am considering going a step further and moving to Proxmox on 45Drives hardware. We use them for storage and their support for open source has been amazing.