>they have no idea what benefits it has or how to migrate from ESXi

then they shouldnt be considering doing that in the first place. sounds like they simply cannot afford vmware, and in this case you pay to play with the big dogs.

esxi works great (we use over 1400 guests at my shop), and if you are pure windows then hyper-v works great as well. esxi works much better with linux guests

the only other alternative is MAYBE kvm, but when you are in business going with something just because its open source doesnt mean shit, because you will still have to call someone to fix problems.

For what purpose? Openstack is used to build a private cloud and can sit on top of Vsphere setups. I doesn't even implement HA directly.

>>54758324
Red hat has a commercially supported KVM solution.

>>54758324
They've got more liscences than they have hosts, money probably isn't the issue, they just want to explore their options

>>54758403
If it's just a technical evaluation on a dev environment I don't see much of a issue.
But what's the problem with the current setup? What problem are you trying to solve.

>>54758460
They don't even have any issues that I know of, they're in the early stages of falling for a meme