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 GUI interface makes the management of KVM easier than ever before."
"The product's scalability is good...It's a very stable 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."
"A very reliable solution which can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with reasonable overhead."
"The initial setup was simple."
"The most valuable feature of KVM is its stability."
"The performance is great."
"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."
"Its dynamic resource scheduling and its fault tolerance capabilities are two features that I've found to be valuable. I also like that VMware vSphere is stable, scalable, and easy to install."
"The initial setup is very easy and takes half an hour to complete."
"The solution is also very simple and efficient to manage. Features that have made it simple and easy to manage include the newer VAMI for the V-center appliance, it's very easy to see what version we are at, and very easy to upgrade to the next version. The fact that we can now use VCHA at the appliance level just decreases our chance of having an outage because so many of our customers rely on the API interface for V-center."
"The most valuable features are the resilience of the solution and vMotion."
"Scalability is the big advantage of it. The product itself allows us to scale on the fly as we need it, and plan for the future."
"Server Virtualization is the most important feature because that helps me to utilize 100% capacity of my physical server or box. Its redundancy, uptime, or high-availability is also valuable. Storage-sharing is also valuable. In vSAN, I can utilize the maximum storage. In the physical boxes, if you don't require storage, it lies idle, but with VMware or any kind of virtualization, you can utilize the full storage."
"I like stability and the organization of the different functions into the I#M feature which is also quite useful, quite stable."
"It's easy to use."
"The stability of this solution is less than other products in the same category."
"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."
"The virtual manager and the graphical QEMU for KVM need some improvement."
"Technical support is not top-notch."
"I believe KVM offers a unified answer, while ProxMark addresses orchestration. KVM lacks orchestration. If the aim is to centrally oversee multiple KVMs – let's say to freeze them – a centralized management solution is absent."
"The main drawback in the solution is probably disaster recovery."
"Lacks high availability across clusters as well as support for Apache CloudStack."
"Its resource usage can be improved."
"Stability-wise, there are some minor issues."
"The vSphere Client always feels slow, and/or like it doesn't keep up with what I'm trying to do. So I usually use the thick client most of the time."
"They need to stop pushing code out so fast."
"VMware vSphere could improve on the automation features and the ease of use of the solution in many areas, such as the interface. However, VMware is doing lots of great things."
"The license fee could be more affordable."
"Security and patch-related items need improvement."
"They need to further develop graphics virtualization."
"It's inherently complex. Operating a large virtual infrastructure is not an easy task for anyone."
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 RHEV. 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.