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Hyper-V vs RHEV vs VMware vSphere comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Server Virtualization Software category, the mindshare of Hyper-V is 19.1%, up from 14.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of RHEV is 2.4%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSphere is 19.4%, up from 17.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Virtualization Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware vSphere19.4%
Hyper-V19.1%
RHEV2.4%
Other59.1%
Server Virtualization Software
 

Featured Reviews

Tomas Basus - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Professional at NIPOS
Virtualization has reduced licensing costs and improved integration but still needs better performance insight
Integrations bring the biggest benefit to us. We use half of our virtual machines that are Microsoft, so it works better hosted in Hyper-V compared to VMware. Clustering and failover capabilities in the product help with our availability. It helped because we switched to Hyper-V because it was lower cost than paying for high availability in VMware. We need Microsoft licenses for virtual machines, so it costs less than buying two solutions for that. We have data center editions, so it did not cost us additional money compared to paying for high availability from VMware. I think it helped a little, but not so different compared to VMware regarding security and bandwidth optimization.
Mike Neuliep - PeerSpot reviewer
Linux Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Has supported virtualization projects in side jobs but has required workarounds due to lack of maintenance
In my opinion, the best features of RHEV are that it is a real hypervisor and it is free, so it performs better than VMware. I have used the live migration feature in the past with RHEV. There is a free clone of it that is based on the open source. Live migration is a nifty feature if your app is not highly available and you need to do maintenance on a machine. You can migrate the VM off of it, do your maintenance, and move it back when you are done. RHEV has a high availability architecture with a built-in monitoring feature where you could see machines other than the one you are operating on. I tend to implement high availability not so much in RHEV, but by using standard application high availability strategies. Red Hat has another product specifically for high availability.
IA
IT Director at Def Industry
Has improved infrastructure monitoring and resource management but requires better support and cost efficiency
The high availability feature's resilience is not bad, but it could be better. For example, whenever you lose any hardware, you will have interruptions on the services, and it reboots again on the other hardware host which is available at the crash time. That's good, but we would prefer to have zero downtime instead of the rebooting on the other server. We would prefer to have a zero downtime always-on configuration. VMware vSphere has a built-in feature called Fault Tolerance, but it's very limited for very limited VMs or very limited core count or CPU count, so it's not so useful for all the environment because of the limitations. The Fault Tolerance (FT) feature is very limited to very little core counts or very little VM counts, so you can't run the Fault Tolerance for all the servers or all the VMs, and that's very bad. If VMware vSphere could have any kind of built-in patch management environment with a repository, offline repository option, with test, non-production, and production environment separated, this would be perfect. Management of patch management with operating systems and including third-party applications which are running on the servers would enhance the VMware vSphere environment. VMware vSphere is very expensive. The worst aspect of VMware vSphere is the price. I can't tell you the exact cost at this time because the other team members in my teams are working on it, but I remember that the prices are very high. VMware vSphere is easy to scale, but it could be better, similar to a Kubernetes environment. It should have an automatic scale-out feature when the load gets high; if it gets some scale out automatically, it would be better than this, similar to Kubernetes or OpenShift.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The interface is quite good."
"The setup was straightforward and easy for our company. The deployment was fast."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the storage virtualization."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to integrate the Hyper-Visor center from one console."
"Hyper-V is completely free, which is a significant advantage."
"Hyper-V has improved our organization by enabling consolidation, high availability, disaster recovery, backups, and more."
"Hyper-V is a scalable solution; we are a global center, and we use Hyper-V across 22 countries."
"The initial setup was very easy."
"It is very stable."
"In my opinion, the best features of RHEV are that it is a real hypervisor and it is free, so it performs better than VMware."
"When any organization needs end-to-end infrastructure deployment, configuration management, and automation, then RHEV is the best fit."
"What they provide is way beyond the essential requirements of customers."
"The solution makes migration easy."
"The biggest aspect for me is the disk usage, the virtual manager, and the deployment of machines."
"The price is the solution's most valuable aspect; it's much cheaper than, for example, VMware, so companies can save money using it if they need to."
"Technically, the main reason why I'm using Red Hat is because of its stability."
"An easy way of providing near-zero downtime services, the operation of the instances between clustered services, and providing the projected SLA for our customers."
"The most valuable feature is the VDP Backup solution."
"As soon as we switched over from Workstation to ESXi and vCenter, the downtime was very minimized, and growth and flexibility are now there."
"It's very transparent and independent."
"On the server side, we have definitely seen ROI; if servers fail we just restart them, if a piece of hardware fails we just move it, and we have been able to double our load without adding any more staff."
"It is very versatile. All features are beneficial and very good, especially DRS and resource pooling."
"We were able to centralize the server farm, thus able to focus administrators on their immediate tasks, reduce response time to incidents, concentrate the informational flows, facilitate the task of data protection."
"I think it's really good, it's good for our size and for our future growth."
 

Cons

"The weakness of Hyper-V is in its interaction with iSCSI protocols."
"The cost and licensing can be improved."
"I would like Microsoft to put more effort into the Admin Center interface and make it much easier. It is customizable, but you have to be a PowerShell expert to customize these things. That is a limitation."
"Hyper-V doesn't have a lot of features and is limited compared to other virtualization software."
"If I was going to a demo, and somebody had given me an iPhone and I had to quickly gut it, my first choice would not be Hyper-V. It is not a user-friendly solution."
"There is a hard limitation of 20 gigs per file with Dropbox, so you've got to overcome that by chunking the zip files into something smaller and manageable."
"It needs to improve the handling of the amount of storage available."
"The initial setup was complex. It was nearly six years ago, but I remember it was complicated."
"There is not any proper documentation on the site to reference."
"They don't know how to sell their great products and don’t really seem to be interested in taking care of their partners who trust and really know their products."
"We'd like it if it would be possible on Red Hat Virtualization to possibly connect two or three VMs to the same disk."
"If you wanted to go to the desktop computer side of things, it lags behind in that you need to go to something like Fedora to get all the extra bells and whistles."
"The GUI interface needs improvement. Not 90%, but 50% or 60% of the work is done from the command line and so on, so the GUI needs work because people are looking for an easier way to manage the environment."
"The solution should be made more user-friendly."
"Customers are not aware of this solution, they can improve by providing more awareness and solution availability."
"My teammates and I often complain that VMware is well-documented and has a large community since it is the de facto standard. I would love to see better documentation and ease of use."
"I would like to see AI in future releases."
"It is simple to break."
"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 should offer more integration capabilities."
"The biggest issue with stability is the SSO. That is still an issue as far as integrating it with Active Directory, and any large scale of it."
"We stopped using a lot of cloud services. However, I see that VMware has integrated with Amazon Cloud. We will now to have to move everything to the cloud."
"In general, the management features need to be improved."
"The way that vSphere manages the alerts on the data machine is not easy to configure."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I do not have experience with pricing or licensing of the product."
"Because we're an NGO or a charity, we get discount rates from Microsoft. The costs are not astronomical for us. To give you an example, Office 2019 would only cost 30 or 45 for us. We tend to use the on-premises version rather than the cloud version. The reason is that the subscription service works out more expensive after a few years than the on-premise version. We're not worried about having the bleeding edge stuff. We just want it to be functional."
"The pricing is not an issue for us because we have a licensing agreement with Microsoft. So we are given an 80% discount."
"This is a fairly expensive product because it balances the needs of security."
"Hyper-V's price is essentially zero because it's a feature of the operating system that I can enable and disable at will."
"The price is quite fair. It is not too expensive."
"I use the free version of Hyper-V."
"Licensing cost depends on the edition you choose. There are two main options: Standard and Datacenter. With a Datacenter license, you can only create two virtual machines that are covered by the license itself. You can create more VMs, but they won't be licensed and could result in charges during an audit."
"We buy a license for commercial use, and we also use the free editions."
"RHEV offers pricing based on a per-physical-machine licensing model."
"I believe we pay on a yearly basis."
"Its price depends on the use cases."
"The price of RHEV is high. It is an open-source solution, the price should be less. The price should not be on par with a solution, such as VMware. It's not more or equal to VMware, it's less, but the difference should be more substantial."
"This is an open-source solution."
"The solution does not require licencing but a subscription is necessary, which is very affordable."
"It's a budget product as far as I'm concerned. It's way cheaper than any of its competitors. The only thing cheaper than Red Hat is that the people who take the Red Hat code clone it and then self-support it."
"The organization pays the licensing fees."
"It saves us money because we don't have to buy as many physical servers."
"Licensing fees are not paid yearly, or monthly."
"We pay for the license of VMware vSphere yearly."
"This is not the cheapest solution, but when you consider the stability of VMware vSphere, it is a great solution."
"You will find the cost is reasonably cheaper."
"The cost of the licenses is acceptable and we haven't seen any major increases from the vendor in the time we've been using it."
"Its price is slightly higher for India. It is a little bit expensive on a monthly basis when considering the value of the Indian rupee."
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Comparison Review

it_user234735 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Consultant, ASEAN at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
May 10, 2015
Hyper-V 2012 R2 vs. VMware vSphere 5.5
I was won with Hyper-V 2012R2 recently and the table below based on customer RFP (edited). This articles all about technical, there is not related with TCO/ROI, licensing cost, “political”, etc. Another to noted is the Windows Server 2012 licenses is based on 2 socket CPU, meanwhile…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business70
Midsize Enterprise37
Large Enterprise46
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business175
Midsize Enterprise137
Large Enterprise259
 

Questions from the Community

How does KVM compare with Hyper-V?
KVM is better. But let's just look at the software instead of judging. Hyper-V was a free solution from Microsoft to ...
How does Proxmox VE compare with Hyper-V?
One of the best things about Proxmox VE is that it is open-source and very inexpensive. You get all of the same featu...
What do you like most about Hyper-V?
The initial setup is not difficult at all. It is very easy.
What do you like most about RHEV?
The initial setup is fairly straightforward and well-documented. The process is very similar to its competitors. The...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for RHEV?
It's the open source. There's not much cost. It's very minimal comparably. Compared to what I am paying for VMware, i...
What needs improvement with RHEV?
RHEV is not improving because it has been discontinued. It has been discontinued for years. I would love to get back ...
What is IOMMU?
DEEPEN DHULLA did explain well IOMMU. IOMMU has to be activated at the bios level. It exists on Intel and AMD platfor...
Why KVM??? Help please!
We use VMware and KVM. We find that KVM is a lot simpler to use and it provides the virtualization we need for Linux...
Proxmox vs ESXi/vSphere: What is your experience?
For me the biggest impact is the cost of licensing in the case of VMware despite its overall intuitiveness and ease o...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Large customer base from all industries, all over the world. Two major Hyper-V customers are Telefonica and EmpireCLS.
Qualcomm and Bonham's Auction House.
Abu Dhabi Ports Company, ACS, AIA New Zealand, Consona, Corporate Express, CS Energy, and Digiweb.
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, Microsoft, Proxmox and others in Server Virtualization Software. Updated: March 2026.
885,789 professionals have used our research since 2012.