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.
"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 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."
"Documentation and problem-solving troubleshooting are the most valuable features. Performance (when fine-tuned and with "special" HW) is awesome, equal to or more than other enterprise closed-source solutions."
"KVM is stable."
"I like that it's easy to manage. It's also more powerful when it comes to security than others. That point of view is the one consideration. The other consideration is that it's cost-effective."
"The most valuable feature is hypervisor. I can host at the same time different operating systems in Linux Windows."
"The most valuable feature of KVM is its stability."
"The KVM service is well managed with a central policy interface."
"The most valuable features are the virtualization and the performance on the virtualization platform."
"Production people can quickly reboot the server with ESXi Quick Boot."
"An important vSphere feature from a security perspective is VM encryption. As is the right thing to do in this day and age, security needs to be the number one concern for any IT operator. While there are security solutions which can be delivered at the physical, hardware layer, they don't necessarily address all of the requirements from an encryption perspective. Being able to have VM-centric, VM-level encryption is a great feature of vSphere."
"We have seen a performance boost because we have been able to more dynamically allocate either memory or processors."
"Ease of support is one of the main features that we have with it. We're able to take Snapshots before doing updates to make it easy to roll back if something does happen to go wrong."
"VMware vSphere has helped us create our infrastructures and provide services for our customers."
"You don't need too many people to manage the solution once it's up and running."
"Some of the most valuable features are: the ability to Snapshot so that when we do updates we have a layer of protection for simplified rollback; the replication that we can leverage for data center failures and data center downtime; the ease of migrating workloads from physical device to physical device for maintenance that we have to do on physical servers."
"The main drawback in the solution is probably disaster recovery."
"There are some issues with the graphics and some software that is very complex."
"KVM is very difficult to manage and run on daily operations."
"The product must provide better performance monitoring features."
"The grid interface of KVM needs improvement. It could be more beautiful, especially when compared to VMware."
"Support for VF is needed, where you can, for example, export from VMware to KVM."
"The solution should be more user friendly. We are struggling with the command lines."
"The networking with wireless devices needs improvement."
"Higher cost than other similar solutions."
"I would like having something that works on a smaller screen, so we can get to it on our iPads and have it more touch-centric versus having to sit at a laptop."
"The integration capabilities of the solution have certain shortcomings, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The biggest pain point is probably the firmware management of the underlying hardware. It could be a lot better."
"If they improve on the knowledge base and documentation, it would be extremely helpful."
"Reporting on vCenter needs to be improved."
"It needs to integrate better between multiple modules."
"In terms of what could be improved, we do face some bugs when cloning the virtual machine - it fails sometimes."
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.