We performed a comparison between Oracle VM 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: Based on the parameters we compared, VMware VSphere got better user reviews. One major difference between the two solutions is that users say VMware VSphere is more user-friendly than Oracle VM.
"Its ease of management and simplicity are most valuable. It is free, and you can provision an unlimited number of VMs at no cost for clients. They also provide perfect support."
"It is a stable product."
"In terms of server provisioning, it only takes a few clicks of a button and a bit of install automation."
"The product's initial setup phase was simple."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the resource management from the OVM Manager."
"I don't need to create a repository to allocate storage to my virtual machine, rather I can just use store locally."
"The virtualization product Oracle puts out just complements the performance of the database."
"It provides enhancements for network and storage configuration, policy-based management for delivering application resource flexibility, and a GUI."
"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."
"The most valuable features are its flexibility and the ability to move workload."
"VMware's high availability which supports our SLA, VMware on the fly features like LUN expansion, P2V and API integrations are the most valuable features."
"It's much more stable than other products. It is scalable and easy to implement as well."
"This solution's most valuable feature is its High Availability."
"The technical support is good and they are available over the internet."
"The product is very easy to install."
"The most valuable feature would be the slight changes they've made to VMFork instant cloning, in which they have abstracted out the parent-child relationship in cloning, in which certain features, like HA and DRS, are now usable on that parent virtual machine. That is wildly amazing and something that wasn't available until 6.7."
"Integration with cloud products would be beneficial."
"There are currently issues with centralized storage."
"The solution is an outdated Xen-based application."
"I've found that using Oracle VM is like stepping back in time. It's not kept up with technology. The only reason anyone uses it is that they're afraid of Oracle's licensing. Oracle has a tremendously bad licensing approach."
"One is the hypervisor. Right now, it’s all using Xen. What would be really helpful is to have some choice, and the underlying hypervisor technology use KVM which is very popular with certain workloads."
"Integrating with the internal system is not very easy."
"There have been some security issues in the past."
"If there are issues with the storage, then all the machines go down, even if I have a backup solution in place."
"To manage it properly, you have to know this product really well."
"The biggest pain point is probably the firmware management of the underlying hardware. It could be a lot better."
"I would like to see more software as a service solutions."
"The licensing costs are expensive and most of the important features require a license."
"There was a time we lost the password for the ESXi and we had to do a hardware reset. At this point, we had to fill up the ESXi from the bottom up. I am not sure if there was another solution to this problem but it took a long time."
"VMware vSphere could be improved with cheaper costs."
"My biggest suggestion would be some kind of a mechanism - and it's almost an AI-type thing, a Siri/Cortana - for where to find how to do certain things. If there was the ability to just type in a basic question and say, "How do I change the VM settings for this?" and it could bring me right there, that would be really awesome."
"The solution could be cheaper and less expensive."
Oracle VM is ranked 7th in Server Virtualization Software with 77 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 446 reviews. Oracle VM is rated 8.0, while VMware vSphere is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Oracle VM writes "A cheap option available for Linux environments which is useful for many workloads". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSphere writes "Offers good performance and is useful for banking systems". Oracle VM is most compared with KVM, Oracle VM VirtualBox, Proxmox VE, Hyper-V and RHEV, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, VMware Workstation, KVM and Nutanix AHV Virtualization. See our Oracle VM 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.
VMware VSphere is better than Oracle VM because on Oracle Virtual machine migration is not an easy task as in VSphere due to complications existing in Oracle VM.
Also, Oracle VM is limited in features compared to VMware.
Oracle VM is limited also in communicating with other virtualization platforms like VMware.
If you need performance then Oracle OVM is more reliable.
Otherwise, VMWare is good enough. We are using 4 virtualization platforms in the production, development and test environments.
Technically, Oracle OVM is the best for Oracle products apps/databases. VMware is for Linux guest OS.
And hyper-v is for a Windows guest OS but hyper-v lacks network security and configuration.
Oracle VM seems to me to be kind of outdated. Nevertheless, it is fairly straightforward to use and maintain. The solution can just be set and you can forget about it, and the scalability is considered to be quite good. Oracle VM’s customer service and technical support are really outstanding. With this solution, you have the ability to patch with no downtime. Oracle has been around for a long time. It is complete in terms of its features, functionalities, and sophistication. It may provide good documentation and be easy to set up, but it has a terrible licensing structure. Oracle VM may help a company manage its costs, but that can come at another expense for a company - you have to work with an antiquated system.
VMware VSphere is fairly priced. Like Oracle VM, it provides near-zero downtime services. I think the way information is monitored needs to be improved. I feel like they need to have a better solution for hybrid clouds and migration to the cloud. It would also be nice to have additional integration options with different solutions at the application level (for example, Kubernetes). One of the biggest issues I have with it, is the firmware management of the underlying hardware. For firmware upgrades, for example, you have to take down your entire system. Even though it makes it easy to create virtual machines, it could be more user-friendly. In addition, the customer service and technical support seem to be average, but nothing spectacular. Overall, I would say that VMware VSphere is pretty stable and implementation is fairly easy.
Conclusion:
I’m not overly thrilled about either solution, but having had experience with both, I think VMware VSphere is better because it is easy to scale, pretty easy to use, easy to maintain and is mostly stable. And also, while Oracle VM may be more well known, I am not willing to work with an outdated product, especially since there are multiple other modern solutions available.