Depends on your perspective. If you think that grabbing source or pre-compiled bits and deploying it, like say, LINUX, you are going to be in for a rude awaken

Depends on your perspective. If you think that grabbing source or pre-compiled bits and deploying it, like say, LINUX, you are going to be in for a rude awakening. Not easy, lots of architectural and configuration items to consider. For all intents and purposes you are attempting to build AWS or GCE from scratch. Its going to be complicated. OTOH, if you consider exactly what you are trying to solve for, pick a supported distort and go with that - the big players all focused on different verticals from the outset, and their strengths map to those niches. Many of them are pretty solid from an architecture, implementation, and support perspective. But in no way think that OS is a replacement for VMware...it just isn't.