For automation, I did not evaluate other products available in the market. For locations in the Asia Pacific region, I would prefer Ansible, but I am not familiar with it.

Acropolis from Nutanix.

We also looked at Microsoft Hyper-V. 

We evaluated Microsoft System Center Orchestrator at the same time, but vCenter is the solution that was chosen. One of the reasons that we chose it was the price.

We evaluated and analyzed several similar products and we selected VMware as being most suitable for our requirements.

I looked at Zen, VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and the free Linux solution. My decision was made by the fact that our product support team only specifically supports virtualization on VMware.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.