Agreed... Only real enterprise alternative is Hyper-V - I have used it quite a bit and do like it, but, I just don't feel as happy using it as I am ESX.
Like Windows is dominant on the desktop, ESX pretty much owns the (paid virtualisation) ecosystem through many third party programs.
Microsoft is getting there, it is just much slower, but, a price increase like this could be (but I doubt it) VMware's undoing.
Microsoft is good at making products that are good enough and staying in the game for a long time.
In 1990, high-end engineering users were very happy with their Unix workstations. Windows NT in comparison kind of sucked -- but over time the suckage was not enough to justify paying $20,000 for a workstation versus $8k for a NT Workstation.
Ditto SQL Server. Back when I was a newbie Informix DBA, my older colleagues laughed at people messing around with SQL Server. Informix was an awesome product in many ways, but cost like $40,000/cpu when SQL Server cost alot less. Who's laughing now?
Like Windows is dominant on the desktop, ESX pretty much owns the (paid virtualisation) ecosystem through many third party programs.
Microsoft is getting there, it is just much slower, but, a price increase like this could be (but I doubt it) VMware's undoing.