They are not the only ones. The company I work for uses a LOT of VMware. Mind you, VMWare has ALWAYS been expensive. To the point that in a lot of cases, you can end up spending more on VMWare than the hardware that runs it. I long ago crunched the numbers and came to the conclusion that unless your workload really does require the kind of exceptional storage, networking, and HA integration that VMware (claims to) provide, you are better off using an open source solution for your VM infra and hiring a couple of extra engineers to manage it.
When it was time for our contract to renew a few months back, our licensing and support quote was 3x the previous year and Broadcom would not budge, even a little. They said take it or leave it. Well, we left it.
There is a big internal effort now to get us off of VMware and onto Kubernetes and OpenShift. Our whole fleet of VMware is still running but we're on borrowed time as we're on our own if any major technical issue comes up.
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