You can do the same thing with Proxmox VE. IMO, Proxmox is a much better choice for stand-alone VM hosts. The UI alone is certainly miles better.
Where VMware shines is when you want to virtualize multiple datacenters and manage them all from a single browser window. Getting hundreds of hosts and datastores managed all under one vCenter umbrella all while eliminating single points of failure, while not trivial, is the bread and butter of VMware and it works very well once it's all up and running.
The ESXI UI is vastly cleaner and more VM Focused. The network stack is easier to work with, and setting up passthrough is dead easy. A big plus to ESXI is how easy it is to export a VM and move it to another machine. The Export/Import method on Proxmox sucks, and all CLI. Plus there are a lot of premade VMware images out there that spool up in minuets on ESXI, getting them up and running on proxmox is a chore.
Proxmox is not bad if doing everything from scratch in Proxmox, and you don't need to move VMs arount.
Plus don't get me started on lack of a filebrowser on proxmox.
Performance is better with ESXI anyways. Only downside to ESXI is hardware limitations.
Proxmox fall down on Enterprise tooling and integration with other software enterprises use to run the business
Things like Monitoring Platforms, Backup Solutions (veeam), Automation tool kits (powershell), etc.
I like Proxmox, I use it personally, but in its current form I do not see how any medium or large enterprise that has is management tooling around VMWare could just drop in proxmox.
not super critical but is there a terraform provider for proxmox? I looked at proxmox a while back when building my home server but went with esxi free because of the community provider - https://github.com/josenk/terraform-provider-esxi
Where VMware shines is when you want to virtualize multiple datacenters and manage them all from a single browser window. Getting hundreds of hosts and datastores managed all under one vCenter umbrella all while eliminating single points of failure, while not trivial, is the bread and butter of VMware and it works very well once it's all up and running.