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IBM PowerVM vs Red Hat OpenShift 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.7
PowerVM saves costs by charging for allocated cores, proving more cost-effective and reliable than physical servers over five years.
Sentiment score
7.8
Red Hat OpenShift improves productivity, offers cost savings, enhances system stability, and provides 15% ROI, especially in privacy-focused sectors.
The return on investment is substantial, though other platforms may offer a better ROI, primarily due to lower costs involved in setup and maintenance.
If calculated over a five-year period, IBM PowerVM is 30 to 40% more cost-effective than physical servers despite initial costs seeming high.
With OpenShift combined with IBM Cloud App integration, I can spin an integration server in a second as compared to traditional methods, which could take days or weeks.
Moving to OpenShift resulted in increased system stability and reduced downtime, which contributed to operational efficiency.
It is always advisable to get the bare minimum that you need, and then add more when necessary.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.8
IBM PowerVM's support is praised for responsiveness and expertise, though challenges arise without subscriptions; stability minimizes service need.
Sentiment score
6.8
Red Hat OpenShift support is mixed, praised for expertise but criticized for slow responses and varying experiences based on subscription.
IBM provides strong support.
IBM offers excellent customer support.
IBM's technical support is outstanding, with seamless global coordination and prompt resolutions.
Red Hat's technical support is responsive and effective.
I have been pretty happy in the past with getting support from Red Hat.
Red Hat's technical support is good, and I would rate it a nine out of ten.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
IBM PowerVM excels in scalability and flexibility, efficiently managing resources and users for both small and large enterprises.
Sentiment score
7.5
Red Hat OpenShift offers efficient scalability with automated features, easy deployment, and adaptability, despite cost and infrastructure considerations.
An IBM server can handle up to sixty-four terabytes of RAM.
The product is scalable due to PowerVM's virtualization features, such as shared processor functionality and partition mobility.
I think IBM PowerVM uses a 'pay as you grow' model, allowing customers to scale their resources as needed.
The on-demand provisioning of pods and auto-scaling, whether horizontal or vertical, is the best part.
OpenShift's horizontal pod scaling is more effective and efficient than that used in Kubernetes, making it a superior choice for scalability.
Red Hat OpenShift scales excellently, with a rating of ten out of ten.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.5
IBM PowerVM is praised for exceptional stability and uptime, outperforming competitors like SPARC, Nutanix, and VMware in reliability.
Sentiment score
7.7
Red Hat OpenShift is praised for stability, reliability, and features like Blue-Green deployment, with minor issues quickly resolved.
The stability of IBM PowerVM is exceptional, as industry reports have named IBM Power and Z as the most stable platforms globally for 15 consecutive years.
Our clients in India using Power Servers have been running their servers for the last four to five years without any reboot.
The product operates reliably, and following IBM’s best practices ensures robust stability.
It provides better performance yet requires more resources compared to vanilla Kubernetes.
I've had my cluster running for over four years.
It performs well under load, providing the desired output.
 

Room For Improvement

IBM PowerVM needs usability, pricing, automation, integration improvements, and a GUI to better compete and enhance user experience.
Red Hat OpenShift needs better documentation, improved usability, and enhancements in security, integration, technical support, and installation processes.
We have a strong relationship with IBM, which aids decision-making in transitioning clients from mainframe to other platforms.
PowerVM should integrate some capabilities of VMware vCenter to improve its management features.
From a product perspective, I would like to see faster certification of open-source products on IBM Power Systems.
Learning OpenShift requires complex infrastructure, needing vCenter integration, more advanced answers, active directory, and more expensive hardware.
Red Hat OpenShift's biggest disadvantage is they do not provide any private cloud setup where we can host on our site using their services.
We should aim to include VMware-like capabilities to be competitive, especially considering cost factors.
 

Setup Cost

IBM PowerVM pricing is high but offers reliability, flexible licensing, and potential TCO savings despite cheaper alternatives.
Red Hat OpenShift pricing is high but potentially cost-effective for large enterprises, offering comprehensive support and enterprise capabilities.
Pricing is a concern in Argentina due to the higher cost of mainframe solutions.
PowerVM itself is free with the purchase of an IBM server.
While initially costly, the ROI over five years proves IBM PowerVM is cost-effective, resulting in a 30 to 40% reduction in costs compared to a physical setup.
Initially, licensing was per CPU, with a memory cap, but the price has doubled, making it difficult to justify for clients with smaller compute needs.
Red Hat can improve on the pricing part by making it more flexible and possibly on the lower side.
The cost of OpenShift is very high, particularly with the OpenShift Plus package, which includes many products and services.
 

Valuable Features

IBM PowerVM offers stability, flexibility, and high availability with robust virtualization, cloud integration, and optimized workloads for Oracle and SAP HANA.
Red Hat OpenShift is valued for its security, scalability, automation, multi-cloud flexibility, and efficient management interface.
Features like partition mobility enhance the machine's capabilities, making it an ideal tool for virtual environments with reliability, availability, and serviceability.
PowerVM excels in efficiently managing all systems and environments, including development, UI, and production.
It supports specific workloads, like Oracle and SAP HANA, much better due to its shared processor pool feature which reduces licensing costs.
Because it was centrally managed in our company, many metrics that we had to write code for were available out of the box, including utilization, CPU utilization, memory, and similar metrics.
The concept of containers and scaling on demand is a feature I appreciate the most about Red Hat OpenShift.
A valuable feature of Red Hat OpenShift is its ability to handle increased loads by automatically adding nodes.
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM PowerVM
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
10th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
62
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (3rd), Container Management (12th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (6th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Server Virtualization Software category, the mindshare of IBM PowerVM is 1.3%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 1.6%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Virtualization Software
 

Featured Reviews

Desianto Abdillah - PeerSpot reviewer
A practical virtualization environment with a Live Partition Mobility feature that help us handle virtual adapters effectively
The practicality of IBM PowerVM is a crucial feature, especially with the help of HMC (Hardware Management Console). The Live Partition Mobility help us handle virtual adapters effectively when we need to upgrade firmware or the system, and LPM helps us transfer workloads with minimal downtime. This feature ensures that our systems remain online even during maintenance, significantly minimizing any potential disruptions.
Pratul Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Adopting a flexible and efficient approach with noticeable improvements in operational costs and continued challenges in job management
Currently, one of the biggest challenges we face is with services and jobs. For spawning batches, although it has crons, it is not easy to integrate with enterprise systems such as Autosys. The entire company uses Autosys, but we are not able to integrate it effectively. We need intermediate servers to run OC utility commands and initiate the cron job. We have to do a lot of modifications to ensure our batches work properly. With physical or virtual servers, even in AWS, we are able to write and manage multiple jobs. Managing batches in Red Hat OpenShift has been a significant challenge. Integrating third parties is a challenge with Red Hat OpenShift. For example, with Elasticsearch, onboarding itself was difficult, running file beats and dealing with routing issues. It is not straightforward, especially since we have some components in AWS as. AWS has many capabilities that come out of the box and are easier to work with compared to Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift's biggest disadvantage is they do not provide any private cloud setup where we can host on our site using their services. The main reason we went with Red Hat OpenShift was because it is a private cloud, and we have regulatory requirements that prevent us from using public cloud.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
30%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM PowerVM?
Managing other operating systems is also straightforward with IBM PowerVM.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM PowerVM?
IBM’s licensing model offers flexibility in subscription terms, now allowing one- to five-year options. They have introduced a subscription-based model for some systems, creating a more cost-effect...
What needs improvement with IBM PowerVM?
From a product perspective, I would like to see faster certification of open-source products on IBM Power Systems ( /products/ibm-power-systems-reviews ). While the product has robust features and ...
How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...
Which would you recommend - Pivotal Cloud Foundry or OpenShift?
Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a cloud-native application platform to simplify app delivery. It is efficient and effective. The best feature is how easy it is to handle external services such as database...
What do you like most about OpenShift?
OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.
 

Also Known As

PowerVM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Sto, Soitec, SNO, Bundesrechenzentrum GmbH, Al Mansour Holding, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Huhtamaki, ELK Group, IT-Informatik, Arkansas Tech University, Pneuhage
UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM PowerVM vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.