Ask Paul: May 3 (Premium)

Happy Friday! I'm feeling a certain alignment in thought in this week's questions, so let's dive in and get the weekend started a bit early.
But first, some unfinished business
I promised a post about Premium video/interactivity a few weeks back and got distracted sorry. I'm working on that, plus some other Premium feedback I'd like to get around comments, forums, and so on. So I will hopefully get that all done soon. Sorry for the delays.
Virtually in the cloud
Leo_W asks:

Have you been following the changes Broadcom has been making to VMWare since their purchase? At first glance it looks like the cost of running ESXi is soon going to be much higher. I wonder if that will be the nudge to get companies to migrate to other virtual services.

and wright_is asks:

With the Broadcom takeover of VMware, we are seeing a lot of movement to people looking at Proxmox, for example, and other open source solutions as a replacement to VMware. I really don't understand Broadcom, they buy a market leading product and, before the deal is even through, they start alienating as many customers and partners as they can... I just don't see the business logic behind their actions.

I almost view Broadcom as a kind of plumbing (i.e. infrastructure) provider so I guess VMWare sort of makes sense in that way. But I also feel. like VMWare to doomed to bounce between various corporate parents. Not sure what's going on there. Surely an independent, standalone company might make more sense for its customers at this point.

Regardless, there is always a debate about pricing when it comes to valuable services like that. (Even in my tiny corner of the world, we debated raising prices, and that was one of the last things George left me with. I don't see it.) Anyway, Microsoft has predictably responded to this price hike by offering a VMWare Rapid Migration Plan with discounts aimed at getting those workloads on Azure.

Microsoft has all kinds of anti-competitive issues, of course, and perhaps most notably in the cloud these days. But this is a good example of why competition matters. These companies can work off each other and compete not just on features but on price. And now that moving from cloud to cloud is fairly seamless and low-cost—a neat benefit from the consumer subscription world—that benefit is even better.

And related to this, wright_is asks:

Have you ever looked at HyperV (the full HyperV, as opposed to the cut down version in client Windows) and ESXi/vSphere?

Not in years. I shifted to a productivity focus when I moved to Thurrott.com, and while that obviously includes all the Microsoft 365 solutions that impact end users and can intrude into the admin/prosumer space a bit, I don't pay too much attention to the servers anymore or their cloud analogs.

That said, I have one general bit of understanding and one specific recommendation: Microsoft pretty much let Hyper-V languish for several years on the server, no doubt because...