While I agree Microsoft probably doesn’t want to buy VMware, they absolutely have a pretty strong “hybrid cloud” solution, which basically means running an Azure hypervisor on your on-prem servers.
Really it’s just Hyper-V with extra “cloud management” bits (“Azure Arc” and friends), but it’s _relatively_ friendly to manage alongside your Azure cloud resources once you set it up.
Bottom line is, I really don’t think they’re worried about on-prem hypervisors competing with Azure!
Yeah that's kind of what I was about (though probably not worded very well).
For the on-prem virtualization use cases they are interested in, they already have the necessary technology with Hyper-V.
I actually thought that vSphere offers some stuff in the hyperconverged area that Hyper-V doesn't, this is where I could see it competing with Azure. However it seems Hyper-V with Storage Spaces Direct seems to be pretty much on par, at least on paper.
So there's even less reasons why MS would be interested in VMware. Only maybe to get rid of a competitor.
Really it’s just Hyper-V with extra “cloud management” bits (“Azure Arc” and friends), but it’s _relatively_ friendly to manage alongside your Azure cloud resources once you set it up.
Bottom line is, I really don’t think they’re worried about on-prem hypervisors competing with Azure!