I had an experiment with vmware to build our next iteration of kubernetes platform, and they were asking why we used rancher and things like that, they got very frustrated when I was trying to do anything with their product and needed to sign up or sign in to a billion things, which I got frustrated and said ‘this! this id why we went with rancher, because there was no friction!’
too bad SUSE is doing the rancher prime stuff now as well.
The whole point (from a savvy business perspective) is throw money at the hardware and throw experience at the software.
In the end, Proxmox is based on KVM and KVM does run a workload or two across the world. VMware isn't KVM and I watched both be born and grow up oh and I should mention Xen but I can't be arsed. Most of the rest are Johnny come latelys.
If I need a massive cloud then I'll go all in on K8s or whatever and get my orchestration hat on big time but for my needs and my customer needs, PVE is more than enough, whilst being just enough.
I was (still am sadly) a VMware consultant for about 25 years. It makes me laugh when I hear breathless "enterprise noises" with regards VMware and how PVE isn't quite ready yet.
PVE is just so easy and accommodating. It's Linux on Debian with a few nobs on. The web interface is so quick and uncluttered and simple. The clustering arrangements are superb and simple. The biggest issue for me and many like me was how to deal with iSCSI SANS (no snapshots - long story) It turns out you can pull the SSDs out of a Dell Msomething SAN and wack them into the hosts and you have a hyperconverged Ceph thingie with little effort.
VMware rapidly gets very expensive. Nowadays with Broadcom you have to fork out for the full enterprise thing to get DRS and vDS - that's auto balancing clusters and funky networking. PVE gifts you Open vSwitch support out of the box and all clusters are equal. Storage DRS (migrate virty hard discs on the fly) is free on PVE too. Oh and you get containers too on PVE - VMware Tanzu is seriously expensive.
Anyway, I could grind on about this for quite some time but in my opinion, PVE is a far better base product in general for your VMs. A vCentre is a horrendous waste of resources and the rest of VMware's appliances are pretty tubby too. I recall evaluating their first efforts at SDN with edge firewalls and so on - no thanks!