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.
"Good screen and keyboard sharing feature."
"It is an easily scalable solution."
"Scaling the solution is easy. You just have to add more hardware."
"I have found KVM to be scalable."
"I appreciate the network passcode feature in KVM, as it provides a convenient way to manage DNS and cloud hosting."
"The performance is great."
"A very reliable solution which can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with reasonable overhead."
"The tool's most valuable feature is backup. The product makes it easy to manage virtual machines. Other tools require third-party applications like VMware and vSphere. However, KVM doesn't require these applications."
"The solution is stable."
"The product offers good stability."
"The solution saves cost."
"It is highly scalable. We need to scale out and up, and we can do that with vSphere. We can easily add more storage, drives, or memory."
"We don't have any downtime because it was built right."
"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."
"The ability to monitor resource utilization."
"We saved a lot of time and hardware with this solution. It also prevents fewer incidents."
"Business continuity features need to be added."
"Its resource usage can be improved."
"The virtual manager and the graphical QEMU for KVM need some improvement."
"The grid interface of KVM needs improvement. It could be more beautiful, especially when compared to VMware."
"Technical support could be better. In the next release, I would like to see an improved user interface and dashboard. This type of improvement will make it easy or help our engineers understand the solution from a requirement point of view."
"Technical support is not top-notch."
"I have encountered difficulties in getting the tool's documentation."
"One problem I have is that it's not very scalable when it comes to resizing the VM disk dimensions. For example, if you have initially set a virtual drive to 10 GB and you want to upgrade it to 15 GB, it's not that easy."
"I would like to see DRS for the GPU machines."
"I would like more Amazon stuff inside of VMware."
"The solution's technical team is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"One of the areas creating a crash is when you are cloning."
"The solution should offer more integration capabilities."
"The container management could be improved. It's far from perfect right now."
"There are occasionally bugs or errors."
"The solution could be cheaper and less expensive."
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.