We performed a comparison between IBM PowerVM and VMware vSphere based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Server Virtualization Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable feature of IBM PowerVM is the performance of the database workload."
"PowerVM's most valuable features include swift optimisation and real-time migration."
"IBM PowerVM has the highest clock speed."
"The most valuable features in this solution are you do not get degradation in the performance like you could get in other solutions. There is a physical adapter that is better than a virtual one and you can assign adapters to a VM."
"The most valuable feature is the flexibility in terms of managing the hardware resources such as RAM, CPU, and the network."
"We always recommend PowerVM to our customers; it is better than most solutions."
"Active Memory Sharing dynamically reallocates memory of running partitions based on changing workload demands. The memory for the pool is carved out from Physical memory and is made logical memory. The said memory is not available to be assigned to partitions as dedicated memory. A min, max and desired as well as weight is assigned to the memory of each lpar to help hypervisor make a decision in case a condition where priority is to be given to a certain lapr to use the memory form shared pool."
"The feature that I like most is the versatility."
"We could easily move workloads from on-premises to the cloud and vice versa if we were running on-premises and cloud, which is one of the most important points in the new releases, in particular."
"Good virtualization and ability to optimize and deliver an automated and orchestrated cloud platform on-prem."
"Security-Features; vSphere does offer quite a bit of security stuff built-in. It is nice to know that we can have the virtual machines encrypted, so that if somebody were to get a hold of any of those files, we don't have to worry about them actually being used. Since we do have so many different departments and areas with a lot of people that need access into the solution, we can use the role-based access controls to really restrict and control who can do what, so everybody can do what they need to do, but they can't do anything else past that."
"The installation process is very straightforward."
"We find the solution simple and efficient to manage."
"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."
"The solution is user-friendly and easy to manage."
"The most valuable feature is the VDP Backup solution."
"The program has very limited solutions for the virtualization of containers"
"This solution is lacking the ability to have servers act as a cluster, such as in VMware. IBM has come out with a feature similar to VMware's vCenter but it is not as mature. They need to add LPM shared-nothing feature, such as in vMotion."
"Any improvements that can be made in the interface will go a long way to helping us work better."
"I don't know whether this has been trialed already, but IBM should give us an alert when we reach seven or eight failovers so that we can automatically switch it to manual mode. That would be great because if we cross the 10-day licensing limit, we have to pay a hefty license cost to Oracle. If IBM could view that feature, it would be helpful in license compliance."
"The performance should be improved."
"A GUI version of VIOS would be a great plus for people moving from Intel-based hypervisors."
"The licensing could be better."
"The cost of this solution is high."
"I would suggest that the tool reconsider its pricing strategy. The recent price hikes could potentially pose a problem for VMware in the future. The recent price increases, especially since Broadcom acquired them, seem excessive. There are reports of businesses experiencing massive price hikes, sometimes as much as 10-30 times higher. This is causing smaller businesses to consider exiting the space altogether."
"VMware vSphere is perfect for the on-premise solution, but we are in the cloud era, so I think maybe VMware needs to invest more in the cloud and the microservice chain. It would be better if VMware offered more cloud solutions and continuous applications."
"The solution could be a bit more user-friendly."
"An improvement could be allowing a "dark mode" for the interface. I think the HTML5 client is a little bit hard to read. It's all white. It's a little bit bright on the eyes. A lot of us IT guys view in the dark."
"In the next release, I would like to see programming. I'd like to see a lot more about customization for people who want to customize programming API, SDK."
"The installation can take a long time, they need to improve on the simplicity and length of the installation."
"We want to see improvement from VMware with security. We want minimal downtime. We want automation. We want to deploy more efficiently."
"We are provided with a mini dashboard that has been improved in the latest version but it still could be better. The monitoring is now available on the vCenter dashboard and the vROps has been added to the basic version that had to be purchased separately before. A complete dashboard has always been provided with some competitors, such as Nutanix."
IBM PowerVM is ranked 9th in Server Virtualization Software with 25 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 446 reviews. IBM PowerVM is rated 8.4, while VMware vSphere is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of IBM PowerVM writes "A stable system for high-end data processing with a great support structure". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSphere writes "Offers good performance and is useful for banking systems". IBM PowerVM is most compared with Hyper-V, KVM, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Oracle VM VirtualBox and Proxmox VE, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). See our IBM PowerVM vs. VMware vSphere report.
See our list of best Server Virtualization Software vendors.
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