Openshift kind of incidentally does virtualization almost begrudgingly. Red hat started to try to be a VMware competitor with ovirt but find VMware customers too stuck in their ways, then abandoned it to chase the cloud buzz word with open stack, but open stack was never that good and also the market for people who want to make their on premise stuff act like a cloud provider is actually not that big anyway. So they hopped on the container buzzword with open shift and stuck libvirt management in there to have an excuse for virtualization customers that there is a migration path for them.
Meanwhile proxmox scratched their head wondering why everyone was fixated on stacking abstraction layer upon abstraction layer on libvirt and just directly managed the qemu. Which frankly makes their stuff a lot more straightforward technically, and their implementation is a solid realization of the sort of experience that VMware provides. In fact much more straightforward than a typical VMware deployment, and easier to care and feed since it is natively Linux instead of an OS pretending not to be an os like esxi. It also is consistent to manage, unlike VMware where you must at least interact some with esxi but that’s deliberately crippled and then you have to do things a bit differently as you deploy center (which can be weirdly convoluted).
Proxmox is definitely on its way to become a viable replacement for sure. There’s also OpenShift from Red Hat which could be worth a look at as well.
Openshift kind of incidentally does virtualization almost begrudgingly. Red hat started to try to be a VMware competitor with ovirt but find VMware customers too stuck in their ways, then abandoned it to chase the cloud buzz word with open stack, but open stack was never that good and also the market for people who want to make their on premise stuff act like a cloud provider is actually not that big anyway. So they hopped on the container buzzword with open shift and stuck libvirt management in there to have an excuse for virtualization customers that there is a migration path for them.
Meanwhile proxmox scratched their head wondering why everyone was fixated on stacking abstraction layer upon abstraction layer on libvirt and just directly managed the qemu. Which frankly makes their stuff a lot more straightforward technically, and their implementation is a solid realization of the sort of experience that VMware provides. In fact much more straightforward than a typical VMware deployment, and easier to care and feed since it is natively Linux instead of an OS pretending not to be an os like esxi. It also is consistent to manage, unlike VMware where you must at least interact some with esxi but that’s deliberately crippled and then you have to do things a bit differently as you deploy center (which can be weirdly convoluted).