Certainly a downward trend, but not out
VMware is on a downward trajectory, no doubt. Companies that are starting out will likely go to AWS or Azure since that is the model everyone is chasing these days, but there are still many companies that are far in bed and under the covers with VMware, and they aren't going to go anywhere.
We have fairly large VMware environments - almost 3000 vms altogether. The bean counters and sales people all think we have to move to AWS, but they have yet to look at the costs. It would be a minimum of 3 times the price without even factoring in everything we would need to change to deal with AWS and their differences.
I agree with tabbu, VMware used to always be excellent software and support was equally excellent. It has all turned to shit. We are deploying esxi 6, and surprise, some VMs just don't want to migrate from the esxi 5 hosts to 6. The only fix is to turn them off and back on. This was esxi 6 update 1 mind you, we waited until that came out.
Opened a ticket for said problem, since we have about 100 of these VMs now in production that can't migrate, so we can't finish the upgrade. Update 2 has a fix for these VMs that won't migrate. Fantastic.
Apply the fix - and now all the sudden the VMs that wouldn't move before move, but they run like complete shit on the esxi 6 boxes until you shut them down or move them back to the esxi 5 box. Support had no answers for me. I told them we'll just leave it on the old version without the patch, and get downtime to shut down these boxes. What a joke.
The next undocumented feature is that you can no longer delete datastores with the delete command. You have to unmount them first. I got two fellows on support calls who barely spoke my language, and they told me its always been this way - when I mentioned that its never been this way in the 10 years I have used the product, they had no answer. I told them to escalate - no answer.
Told my sales rep and closed the ticket, but I gave them an earful. I don't know how we can give them this much money every year in support and get what is now clearly EMC level support. grrrrr.....
Needless to say, I don't think we have a lot of options. Vitualization has allowed us to save a lot of money and get by with fewer people. I am trying to imagine even getting the time to look at another option, let alone migrate almost 3000 machines to it.