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 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."
"The product is really good...One can get good performance because of kernel-based virtualization."
"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."
"The KVM service is well managed with a central policy interface."
"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."
"Our production servers are running in Linux, and this solution supports that environment well."
"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."
"Good screen and keyboard sharing feature."
"The solution's flexibility allows us to implement it widely."
"Workloads; We use vSphere for mission-critical apps including SAP and and part of our internal development in C+, for the solution that collects everything for the buyers."
"Virtualization, VDI and application publishing are the most valuable features of VMware vSphere."
"vMotion is one of the most useful features, which helps to provide both flexibility and High Availability. With new versions of vSphere and vCenter, it is still improving (e.g., vMotion across vCenter Servers and virtual switches)."
"The vMotion in particular I think is the most valuable because this feature provides migrations of virtual machines in case you want to run do maintenance."
"Using vSphere we have virtualized over one thousand servers and this gave us management, cost and datacenter space advantages."
"I like that it's like a distributed rescheduler. You can move to and use VMotion as well. You can move the server and move the virtual machines around different physical servers. This makes it easier when it comes to redundancy."
"The product is very easy to install."
"The stability of this solution is less than other products in the same category."
"In KVM, snapshots and cloning are areas where there could be a little more sophistication, like VMware."
"Some things are pretty basic, and they could be more robust with more detail."
"We are not getting good support from KVM, and it is not that user-friendly."
"The only negative aspect of needing hardware support is a fully functional KVM can be dropped. It would be nice if the support for other platforms, like ARM or Risk, were as good as the x86 one. However, with the democratization of Chromebooks based on these chips and mobile devices, it will not take long for that to happen."
"There are some issues with the graphics and some software that is very complex."
"The KVM tech support is really bad. They are not very responsive."
"The virtual manager and the graphical QEMU for KVM need some improvement."
"The reporting could be improved."
"We previously had a hard time using tech support."
"The latest version of the solution has a few bugs."
"Get the HTML5 client to 100% parity to replace the Flash client."
"When it comes to cross-regional (e.g., someone in the US managing the China vSphere implementations), it can be a somewhat slow. I would recommend increasing the speed. While there has already been improvement there, I would like to see more."
"It's an expensive solution."
"The ability to run ARM based VMs on an x86 platform for testing purposes. With the growing use of SBCs running on ARM architectures for IoT devices, it would be very useful if developers could build and deploy VMs running operating systems like Raspbian used on Raspberry Pi devices on their existing x86 ESXi environments. Even if this is not possible through some form of emulation, the ability to add ARM hypervisors to vSphere environments would be very useful. This will enable more rapid development cycles for customers just getting started with IoT but already existing vSphere users."
"Integration with different platforms could be improved."
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, VMware Workstation, Oracle VM 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.