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.
"It offers a high-availability environment."
"It is easy to use, stable, and flexible. It is a pretty mature product, and it is faster than VirtualBox."
"If you prefer command-line, there are all kinds of command-line options."
"KVM is stable."
"I like that this is an open-source solution. It is very powerful, and it's easy."
"What I like most about KVM is that it's very easy to use. Everything is built-in, even when writing command lines."
"A very reliable solution which can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with reasonable overhead."
"The most valuable feature is hypervisor. I can host at the same time different operating systems in Linux Windows."
"Since it is riding inside of a multi-hardware environment, downtime is virtually nothing."
"With VMware vSphere, it is easy to manage the scaling of our company's virtual infrastructure."
"It's very transparent and independent."
"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."
"Its stability and manageability are valuable."
"Having a virtualized infrastructure and being able to bring up Windows, Linux, and VMware within a virtualized environment brings more technology into the classroom. Without it, we couldn't do what we do."
"We saved a lot of time and hardware with this solution. It also prevents fewer incidents."
"The speed of the solution is excellent."
"I have previously used VMware and KVM is easier to use. However, they both have their strengths depending on their use cases. They are mostly equal. One of VMware's advantages is it has better support."
"The KVM tech support is really bad. They are not very responsive."
"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."
"Some things are pretty basic, and they could be more robust with more detail."
"The stability of this solution is less than other products in the same category."
"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."
"We are not getting good support from KVM, and it is not that user-friendly."
"I would like to see more focus on microservices and integration with Kubernetes or OpenShift."
"Monitoring information could always be improved."
"The installation is complex and you need to have a good understanding in regards to what you are doing when you are setting it up."
"I would like to see more software as a service solutions."
"Get the HTML5 client to 100% parity to replace the Flash client."
"Reducing the cost of vSphere would be an improvement."
"The technical support is good. However, it could be more seamless when it comes to chat support and lower response times."
"the HTML version of things needs to get a little bit better. The vSphere side of things gets a little difficult to manage; right-click, in some browsers, doesn't work as well as it used to. I'm seeing a little bit of general latency that we didn't used to get with the thick client, although it's getting there."
"I would like them to move into having a containerized application to manage the vCenter."
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.