We performed a comparison between KVM and VMware VSphere based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: VMware VSphere is the winner in this comparison. It is a powerful solution with good customer support and a proven ROI. It is, however, more expensive.
"The most helpful aspect of KVM is the fact that the interface is so minimal. It includes just what you need to set up the VMs and manage them, and it's very simple to do so."
"I find the density of the product most valuable. It is density that a technologist can just assign page merging. This is what makes KVM one of the important players of the virtualization market."
"I think nine out of the ten supercomputers in the world use Linux KVM, so I think that attests to the fact that it is a scalable product."
"The performance is great."
"The product's scalability is good...It's a very stable product."
"The product is really good...One can get good performance because of kernel-based virtualization."
"The key aspect is that the KVM directly interacts with the Kronos. There's no clear indication of indirect communication with Kronos. It is not linked to Kronos, and interaction is straightforward without any intermediaries."
"Scaling the solution is easy. You just have to add more hardware."
"We primarily use vRealize to troubleshoot any issues that may arise with our virtual machines, which is the main reason why we believe this solution is excellent."
"It is a very dependable solution. Its performance is very good, and it is also easy to manage and implement."
"The solution has high availability."
"One of the most valuable features that vSphere has is its HA and DRS protection, where it can simply make sure that all the machines are always where they need to be and how they need to be taken care of. We have a lot of servers and services for emergency services for police, fire, and the like. We have the ability to use DRS as Anti-Affinity Rules to make sure that those redundant server pairs always stay away from each other. But then, if anything would happen to one of them, we have HA to be able to come up and bring it right up and going again."
"VMware Tanzu (container) is the most valuable addition because you get an efficient solution to manage the VM and container in a single pane of glass."
"This product is useful for running multiple virtual machines from a single server so that people can utilize the hardware resources in their organization. Its ability for backups is also valuable. In case of a disaster, you can recover the entire server from the images. It is easy to use. In terms of features, whatever they are providing is more than sufficient for us. We are not exploiting this product up to a hundred percent."
"The enterprise direction is very complete and the data center provides almost everything you need."
"It is a very mature solution that is easy to use and flexible."
"The KVM tech support is really bad. They are not very responsive."
"Support for VF is needed, where you can, for example, export from VMware to KVM."
"Lacks high availability across clusters as well as support for Apache CloudStack."
"Technical support is not top-notch."
"Some things are pretty basic, and they could be more robust with more detail."
"The speed is around thirty percent slower than another competitor. This would be something to work on."
"The virtual manager and the graphical QEMU for KVM need some improvement."
"The stability of this solution is less than other products in the same category."
"As we continue to push mission-critical workloads into vSphere, and those workloads are not readily protected at the application layer for availability, continuing to increase the size limitations on FT-protected VMs would be a great advance."
"The technical support could improve by being a little faster."
"I would like them to move into having a containerized application to manage the vCenter."
"Stability and manageability need improvement."
"It is expensive."
"In the next release, I would love to have Java as a service, platform as a service, and container as a service."
"One of the areas creating a crash is when you are cloning."
"Due to the fact that during the last three months there appeared some critical bugs, the virtual machine backup might be inconsistent."
KVM is ranked 4th in Server Virtualization Software with 39 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 446 reviews. KVM is rated 8.0, while VMware vSphere is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of KVM writes "Delivers good performance because of kernel-based virtualization". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSphere writes "Offers good performance and is useful for banking systems". KVM is most compared with Proxmox VE, Oracle VM VirtualBox, Hyper-V, VMware Workstation and Oracle VM, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and Nutanix AHV Virtualization. See our KVM vs. VMware vSphere report.
See our list of best Server Virtualization Software vendors.
We monitor all Server Virtualization Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.