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 KVM service is well managed with a central policy interface."
"Scaling the solution is easy. You just have to add more hardware."
"KVM has a rich options set which can be directly used or via wrappers, such as libvirt."
"The performance is great."
"It is an easily scalable solution."
"It is easy to use, stable, and flexible. It is a pretty mature product, and it is faster than VirtualBox."
"It is an open ecosystem, and we see there is a benefit in open-source solutions."
"If you prefer command-line, there are all kinds of command-line options."
"Technical support was helpful and knowledgeable."
"The visibility that we have of our VMs is also important. What's being applied? Who has management of them? Laying it out in a virtual environment allows us customization for our students. We're able to respond to the students' needs much more quickly than we could in a physical environment."
"I use customization to prevent any network and DNS collisions to the router."
"We use it to virtualize our server infrastructure. Virtualization has made it easier for us to manage our environment. We can manage it from location, the vSphere web client."
"The solution is user-friendly and easy to manage."
"being able to manage a lot of servers in one pane of glass makes things a lot simpler. Basically, a lot of things just happen in one area. You can roll things over, move things around more dynamically, without having to hit multiple systems."
"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."
"It is easy to maintain our data machines and take snapshots with the solution."
"The KVM tech support is really bad. They are not very responsive."
"The networking with wireless devices needs improvement."
"The main drawback in the solution is probably disaster recovery."
"Business continuity features need to be added."
"The speed is around thirty percent slower than another competitor. This would be something to work on."
"In our setup, we do not have any dashboards or orchestration, and it is hard to manage. We have 25 gig network cards, but the software driver we have only supported 10 gigs."
"I have encountered difficulties in getting the tool's documentation."
"Its resource usage can be improved."
"vSphere itself is great when you don't need to make updates, but any time you have to touch it, unfortunately it's always the little bit of a fight to get it to do what you want."
"In the past, little changes have broken things in vSphere. Going from 6.0, which worked perfectly fine on the Mac Pro, there were certain changes in hardware drivers, when 6.5 came out. Some were no longer present or had been deprecated. As a result, it didn't work on the Mac Pro anymore, which was business critical."
"It would be ideal if they could integrate billing software so that clients can customize it directly on the virtual machine."
"There is definitely room for improvement and that improvement should be in the licensing and the simplicity of procuring additional licenses or additional VMware products. Right now, it's very complex."
"There should be a bit more flexibility in terms of the hardware we can use with the product."
"The installation can take a long time, they need to improve on the simplicity and length of the installation."
"The initial setup is quite complex."
"The user interface could use some improvement."
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.