lol, make me

One of?

I think a lot of enterprises are going to look at RHEV

I don't think so, because:

Development of RHV has ceased and as of August 2020 the product is now only receiving maintenance updates, with extended life phase updates provided until 2026.[8] The successor to RHV is Red Hat's OpenShift container platform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Virtualization

Proxmox

I'm no expert btw, but from what I understand (from speaking with others and researching for my own homelab setup) is that LXD/Incus is now the preferred solution over Proxmox. LXD is faster, the CLI is very good, it has a huge library of ready to run Linux distro images which is convenient, and it runs on top of your favorite distro, which makes it easy to install/setup, more flexible, and more compatible (Proxmox runs an old and custom kernel, which may not be fully compatible with new hardware).

Watch: in a year they’ll offload it to private equity.

and that's the kiss of death for any company

So many companies can’t do this.

I learned years ago that buying something from a big company instead of using a free open source solution is about aoutsourcing responsibility. Its about being able to sue a company about damages instead of hiring reliable personell to run and write fixes for foss software. Also insurance is much easier.

Not that I follow that advice, my company is still 99% foss software.

Let me tell you about a large bank and two data centers operated using VMware and the type of talent the bank is able to hire and retain. A move away from VMware is a 5-year project involving hiring, retraining, design mistakes, budget overruns, and a lot of grey hair. The year was 2012. 7 years later, one DC converted to OpenStack, the project is shelved and the majority of th OpenStack DC gets converted back to VMware due to "OpenStack disaster."

I work in hosting. We mostly use Proxmox for our Hypervisors which is already a step up from "bare" KVM in regards to convenience/ease of use (especially for High availability scenarios and the like) We also run VMWare and while I don't love the "locked down you gotta do it the VMWare way" nature it's often so much easier and the HA is mich more convenient. Also it has proper functionality for custom resourcing/access/billing.

Say what? Going back to only KVM in modern DCs is some crazy talk. If your org is small enough that KVM is even remotely an option, then I'd recommend running a cost/benefit analysis on whether hosting a small server farm on prem is even worthwhile.

But when you're managing hundreds of servers with dozens of various purposes, FOSS solutions aren't always tenable. And not using a mature, feature complete virtualization platform is just straight up masochistic, not to mention potentially dangerous from a security standpoint.

I agree that talent > solutions, but if you want to retain that talent, you have to make their lives not miserable at work, which means sometimes having to purchase solutions to make their lives easier.

Linux KVM. I've used it on bare metal production servers for years.

My bet is Nutanix is going to grow a lot over the next few years.

for meduim to large enterprises that want on-prem infrastructures what are their options nowadays?

Proxmox probably comes the closest, there's also...HyperV (gross)

Gpu passthrough, if you can do that will always be most performant.

If you want the qemu/kvm equivalent of what vmware workstation does, than look into virtualgl, which is very good (a wine port on android uses this to get good performace without direct access to host hardware), but it still may not be everything you want.

Not directly my experience, but qemu/KVM is used for VM-gaming with near bare metal performance