What alternatives to VMWare do you use and why?

Scale Computing makes a product called HC3 which is dead fucking simple. You just buy the nodes. Each node provides both storage and compute resources. The GUI is a web interface that can be accessed from any node. It doesn't require you to maintain a VM just for the web interface. It doesn't have a separate product or license for the ability to migrate VMs between nodes. Adding a node is dead simple and adds storage to the aggregate if the cluster automatically as well as more compute resources such as CPUs and RAM. If you're used to VMware, your going to be in for a shock at how easy this is. It makes it clear just how over engineered and under-integrated VMware's products really are. You can get the switches from them, too, if you want to keep them also covered by the service contract. However, you can just use existing switches as long as they are capable enough. I've done it both ways and with several manufacturers of switches. When it's all set up, you just tell it that you want a VM with X amount of RAM, CPU cores, and storage. If you really want to, you can specify several drives and the size of each, the MAC address(es) for the network interface(s), and a few other things. However, it's beauty is that it just takes care of things behind the scenes for you. No migrating between nodes, no deciding where the storage will be and how to protect it, etc. All date is automatically stored on at least two drives and at least two nodes, to maximize your fail-safes. I had an occasion where a drive failed. The system emailed me the details and asked me to call text support. I did and was in touch with the right person within minutes. The next day, the drive arrived. I called support and they identified the exact node and drive bay. I popped out the old drive and popped in the new one. It even came with the right model of drive sled preinstalled. The system then began rebuilding the missing data on its own. There was no downtime and no end users knew anything happened. Every tech support call I've ever made to then has gotten me to a highly skilled and polite person within a few minutes. Their support is among the best I've ever seen. When the Crowdstrike issue happened a short while ago, I just told it to shutdown the broken VMs, clone the (automatic) snapshot from right before the issue began, and started those clones. The VMs were running again a few minutes after I started looking into it. It was extremely easy. At one job, I even set up automatic sync of snapshots between two clusters. It took less than 10 minutes to learn how to do it, do it, and finish it. Even if we somehow lots an entire cluster, we would be able to be running again within a few minutes. The GUI was so easy that my second level desktop support people were trusted with the process, but I wrote documentation to ease their nerves, too. Honestly, I'd pick Scale Computing over anything else on the market unless you're in need of extremely fine tuned control of the hardware below the VMs. If that's the case, I think I'd go with Proxmox. IMNSHO, Proxmox is way better than VMware for the vast majority of organizations. I just think Scale Computing's level of integration, ease of use, and quality tech support goes so much further than anything else on the market. Good luck to you, whatever product you end up with!