Technology

Except companies are already jumping ship to other solutions. One very large company is moving thousands of VMs to an implementation of KVM, virtually eliminating the insane VM licensing.

Sure there are a few, but its unlikely that many large enterprises will be able to completely migrate away from VMware, evaluate and deploy ancillary support products for the alternate hypervisor, as well as retrain all their support staff inside of the time that their existing support contract expires. All but a lucky few that happened to negotiate a long multiyear support deal under the old licensing terms (and pricing) will be paying at least 1 year of expensive support renewals and more than likely more than one year.

Broadcom knows this and will make these companies bleed until they can migrate away.

Broadcom has all but admitted their own solution is inferior, by converting their workstation virtualization to KVM!

This is what sucks about Broadcom. Vmware vSphere is still a good product with thousands of trained professionals available for hire to support it, and great third party support for things like backup and enterprise support services.

To Broadcom’s credit, the writing was on the wall that versions of KVM would be eating their market over the next 10 years (for example, Proxmox), so they’re getting all they can now before their corner on the market weakens.

There was no such writing. Most large enterprises were just fine paying for VMware licensing under the old terms.

I like Proxmox, but it doesn't even provide half of all the features that vSphere does that are needed for large enterprises. Small shops with a few nodes and no HA requirement? Sure. Hundreds of ESX nodes and tens of thousands of VMs? That is just beyond Proxmox as it is today. Also, good luck hiring Proxmox trained staff. Large companies want ready pools of labor, and Proxmox doesn't have that market penetration today.