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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 May 2026, in the Server Virtualization Software category, the mindshare of Hyper-V is 19.5%, up from 14.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of RHEV is 2.4%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSphere is 19.2%, up from 16.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Virtualization Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware vSphere19.2%
Hyper-V19.5%
RHEV2.4%
Other58.9%
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

"This is the best solution for customers with budget constraints."
"The product is not difficult to set up."
"The solution is highly scalable."
"The technical support for Hyper-V is excellent, and I rate it as nine out of ten."
"The initial setup is easy."
"It works very well. Its performance, stability, and redundancy are all very dependable."
"It is a very stable product. We have not had any issues with Hyper-V crashing itself."
"The solution's ease of use is the most important feature, as it is very easy to use and implement, with very good fail-over features that allow servers to run in a fail-over cluster so that whenever one server fails, you can migrate the workloads to the second one to avoid service downtime or minimize it at the very least."
"The initial setup is fairly straightforward and well-documented. The process is very similar to its competitors. The success of your setup depends on how well you plan."
"We are very satisfied with it."
"Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor has robust virtualization management features with proven enterprise security and performance."
"The biggest aspect for me is the disk usage, the virtual manager, and the deployment of machines."
"Stability and speed are the most valuable aspects."
"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."
"They are so advanced today and so mature in what they do that they could easily give any top-notch industry leaders a run for their money."
"There aren't any bugs on the solution."
"It was brilliant to consolidate systems, and it provided the best way of doing it at the time, as far as I was aware."
"The higher availability and the vMotion, I would say, are what makes it very interesting as you avoid systems being down."
"I would definitely recommend this solution to others."
"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."
"The ease of use with reduced space provides a better use of infrastructure."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is the ease of deployment. It's also user-friendly and has been on the market for more than a decade, so it's a leading technology in hypervisor solutions."
"The solution has high availability."
"This solution's most valuable feature is its High Availability."
 

Cons

"VMware has antivirus protection that covers the entire VM. If Microsoft could have something similar to this in Hyper-V, that would be great."
"It should be deployed with OS so there is no need to install OS separately, only select the OS and get it ready."
"I am using this solution with E-Notes. I heard that there will be future improvements in integration of the E-notes systems. This would be very helpful."
"The management interface is in need of the biggest improvement."
"Hyper-V is hosted on OS but if your OS scratches you are in big trouble. In addition, if a host fails, automatically the machine and the virtual machine should boot from another source. Those type of features would benefit Hyper-V."
"It needs additional administration and monitoring capabilities."
"The biggest problem with Hyper-V is that the virtual machines are mostly running on top of the Windows Server, so we often need to reboot the machine and virtual machines when updating the host level."
"Sometimes there's a bit of slowness in the VMs."
"We'd like it if it would be possible on Red Hat Virtualization to possibly connect two or three VMs to the same disk."
"The biggest improvement would be more third-party direct support for things like backups and provisioning through third-party portals."
"The documentation is not as good as it should be."
"When we do a direct comparison, then obviously VMware does better in terms of having Fault Tolerance and doing active disaster recovery and these kind of things."
"RHEV is not improving because it has been discontinued. It has been discontinued for years."
"The solution has a very small lifecycle."
"We should improve how we manage storage domains and make more comprehensive control available through the command line."
"In comparison to VMware, this solution isn't as stable. We're testing it right now, and we're not trusting the stability of the product."
"Its price should be better. Their support should also be more customer-friendly, and they should train people like us so that we know more about the latest technologies and features."
"It could be more composable. At present, a fluid pool is not available to us, and it would be great to have the flexibility."
"The setup can be complicated for those who are not technically inclined."
"Its price should be better. Their support should also be more customer-friendly, and they should train people like us so that we know more about the latest technologies and features. If there is some program and drive from their side to teach us, it is definitely going to help us. Pricing and support are the most important features for mid-level companies. We are not implementing this solution for big tech companies."
"When it comes to cross-regional (e.g., someone in the US managing the China vSphere implementations), it can be somewhat slow."
"It needs a more friendly UI, as right now it's difficult to see what we’re maintaining."
"There were some stability issues. If you assign a non-dedicated resource to this product, you can see the issue in storage."
"They should improve their storage management part. vSphere has its own file system type, called VMSS, and that file system doesn't report on proper data usage or things like that."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Once we bought the datacenter version of the server, we did away with worrying about the cost of licensing our VMs separately"
"Hyper-V is expensive."
"There is nothing extra required for Hyper-V apart from the licenses that one purchases to use Microsoft Windows."
"I think I'm okay with the cost. There are no monthly or yearly costs or additional costs."
"I recommend Hyper-V to customers with budget constraints."
"We chose this solution because of the pricing and the simplicity of the product."
"This is a fairly expensive product because it balances the needs of security."
"The product's price is low."
"We are using the free version of Red Hat."
"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."
"This is an open-source solution."
"This product has a variety of licensing options available. However, the level of licensing, and therefore the cost of licensing, is dependent on the number of servers being utilized."
"We buy a license for commercial use, and we also use the free editions."
"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."
"We have to pay extra for vulnerability and fault tolerance."
"RHEV offers pricing based on a per-physical-machine licensing model."
"It is expensive."
"This is an expensive product, especially because we need to pay in US Dollars."
"Its price could be lower. There is the cost of one license, and then there is the subscription cost for support."
"We pay for our license."
"We pay for the solution on an annual basis. There are no additional fees other than the standard license."
"Our ROI is time management savings."
"Pricing is a little bit on the higher side, compared to other products."
"​The only issue with vSphere might be with the cost of the tools and the software.​"
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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
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
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 Business177
Midsize Enterprise138
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Hyper-V?
I think regarding price and license for Hyper-V, it is affordable.
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 your primary use case for RHEV?
I have done some consulting where I used RHEV, taking on side jobs to run virtual machines in the financial industry ...
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, Nutanix and others in Server Virtualization Software. Updated: May 2026.
896,298 professionals have used our research since 2012.