I think you're conflating different requirements/usecases.

Sure, a type-1 hypervisor like vSphere is technically better since there's no host OS creating unmanageable contention and if you have guests with higher performance requirements then yeah it's settling for something half-assed.

But in reality, we have some similar shit to a "fax server" that has manually set up weird manufacturer printer settings (local admins tried to be automated/distributed) and old third-party software libraries that "infects" a system globally (2 versions of that library cannot co-exist on a computer).

If that piece of crap can be contained on a VM, as long as it's contained and keeps trucking after a restart/powercycle everyone is happy. What kind of VM container hosts it is really secondary.

(What the software in question is can probably be inferred from the comment, the software is liked by users at the client so it's not going away)

> I think you're conflating different requirements/usecases.

I disagree. protoculture's core statement seems to be:

  A lot of people think VMWare Workstation is the pinnacle product of the company and I have NFI how this came to be.

A company's pinnacle product can be completely useless to me, but that doesn't change the fact that the products of theirs that I do use are very simple and unimpressive when compared to it. [0]

Having said that, I expect that a lot of people think Vmware Workstation is Vmware's pinnacle product because they've never heard of vSphere, ESXi, or anything else the company has made. "People have no knowledge of like 95% of what most companies do." is always a solid first guess when trying to work out confusion like protoculture's.

[0] Please spare me the "But how can it be a pinnacle product if it's not useful to you?" retort and ones like it. I've deliberately made a distinction between a product's usefulness to me personally and the sophistication of that product.

I don't think we're particularly in disagreement here, I think pinnacle product in manys eyes can be both reputational(prob workstation) or economic in addition to technical, so my reply was mostly in terms of replying to the NFI part of that statement and not really in terms of any personal judgement.