No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Red Hat OpenShift vs VMware ESXi 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
7.3
Red Hat OpenShift boosts ROI through cost savings, improved scalability, integration, performance, security, and operational efficiency within 1.5 years.
Sentiment score
5.5
VMware ESXi boosts ROI by reducing hardware costs and staff, despite increased expenses, enhancing efficiency and management.
Time was the major thing which saved a lot, and in terms of resources, it has reduced resource utilization so the remaining users can focus on other tasks.
Server Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
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.
Platform Engineer & Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Moving to OpenShift resulted in increased system stability and reduced downtime, which contributed to operational efficiency.
Infrastructure Manager at Appzone Group
The management burden decreased from a 20-person team to just five or six people providing 24/7 support.
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
Red Hat OpenShift support is praised for responsiveness but criticized for delays in complex cases; online resources are helpful.
Sentiment score
6.7
VMware ESXi support varies, with efficient solutions but slower responses post-Broadcom acquisition impacting overall satisfaction.
Red Hat's technical support is responsive and effective.
Infrastructure Manager at Appzone Group
Customer support is really good because so far in our case, we have always received a prompt response, and they have been really helpful to us.
ML Engineer - Specialist at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The response time for customer support is excellent, and they go deep and can resolve things easily.
Operation Director at Zaintech
I rate the technical support from VMware as nine or ten out of ten.
SAP B1 Support Consultant at Abacus Consulting
In the last three or four years, we did not require any support from VMware engineers, indicating its high reliability.
Head IT at Burraq Cyber Security Solutions
Customer service and support are good; they are reachable, and at times remote support suffices.
Team Lead Virtualization at Hybrid Tech
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Red Hat OpenShift is valued for its scalability and flexibility, supporting many users efficiently despite resource management considerations.
Sentiment score
7.9
VMware ESXi excels in scalability, supporting varied business sizes and seamless infrastructure expansion, despite some licensing challenges.
The on-demand provisioning of pods and auto-scaling, whether horizontal or vertical, is the best part.
Manager IT Infrastructure at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
OpenShift's horizontal pod scaling is more effective and efficient than that used in Kubernetes, making it a superior choice for scalability.
Platform Engineer & Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Red Hat OpenShift scales excellently, with a rating of ten out of ten.
System Analyst at Freelancer
The solution is scalable, allowing us to scale up or down regardless of infrastructure size.
Head IT at Burraq Cyber Security Solutions
vCenter Server can manage up to 1,000 ESXi servers within a single UI interface, allowing extensive deployment and management capabilities.
IT Manager at Synergy Computers
My customers are highly satisfied with its scalability.
Team Lead Virtualization at Hybrid Tech
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Red Hat OpenShift is highly stable, scalable, and reliable, with improvements addressing initial version issues, suitable for production.
Sentiment score
8.3
VMware ESXi is praised for its stability and reliability, with updates effectively addressing occasional downtime and maintenance concerns.
Red Hat OpenShift can scale to thousands of nodes, allowing multiple clusters to be managed in different geolocations and managed by centralized advanced cluster management, ACM.
Operation Director at Zaintech
It provides better performance yet requires more resources compared to vanilla Kubernetes.
Platform Engineer & Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
I've had my cluster running for over four years.
Infrastructure Manager at Appzone Group
ESXi is stable, and our business operations depend on it year after year.
Head IT at Burraq Cyber Security Solutions
Stability rates a perfect 10.
Managing Partner at evercloud
 

Room For Improvement

Red Hat OpenShift struggles with complexity, user experience, scalability, security, integration, and high costs, needing better documentation and support.
VMware ESXi's pricing, usability, and support challenges deter small businesses, needing improvements in scalability and user experience.
Learning OpenShift requires complex infrastructure, needing vCenter integration, more advanced answers, active directory, and more expensive hardware.
Platform Engineer & Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
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.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
If I could change or improve one thing about Red Hat OpenShift, it would be to provide more information on the web because the information is limited and I need to explore more.
Manager Cybersecurity at a outsourcing company with 201-500 employees
Providing a mobile application for remote access to ESXi servers would be beneficial.
Head IT at Burraq Cyber Security Solutions
It's not cost-effective for small users and creates a gap for alternatives, while favoring larger clients.
IT Manager at Synergy Computers
The cost of VMware ESXi is very high, especially after the acquisition by Broadcom, which led to price increases.
Team Lead Virtualization at Hybrid Tech
 

Setup Cost

Red Hat OpenShift offers competitive enterprise pricing with scalable features, but smaller businesses may seek cost-effective alternatives.
VMware ESXi's high costs post-Broadcom acquisition cause dissatisfaction despite straightforward licensing, with potential discounts offering limited relief.
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.
Senior Technical Lead at MORO
The pricing for Red Hat OpenShift is considered quite high.
Manager for Middleware at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing shows that Red Hat OpenShift comes out as an expensive solution compared to having AKS, GKE, or EKS.
Lead Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
The product is very cost-effective, though not fixed, as pricing tends to fluctuate over time.
Team Lead Virtualization at Hybrid Tech
The solution is moderately priced, not exactly cheap yet not overly expensive either.
SAP B1 Support Consultant at Abacus Consulting
The pricing is expensive, with the cost for customers ranging from $10,000 to $20,000 yearly.
Head IT at Burraq Cyber Security Solutions
 

Valuable Features

Red Hat OpenShift is praised for security, hybrid multi-cloud support, scalability, ease of use, and strong integration capabilities.
VMware ESXi offers high availability, robust performance, intuitive management, and seamless integration, ensuring stability, efficiency, and diverse virtualization capabilities.
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.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
The main benefits Red Hat OpenShift provides for me as a final user include the capacity to integrate third-party tools and also the integration between observability, security, and monitoring capacities.
Architect Projects at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
This is one of the main things, in addition to having integration with ACM and ACS, where we can have the ability to manage multiple clusters and to secure them, deploy them, manage them, run GitOps and day-two operations, as well as upgrades and other functionality which is made easy using these tools.
Operation Director at Zaintech
Its capability to move virtual machines to physical machines is very efficient for our live environment.
Head IT at Burraq Cyber Security Solutions
As a level one or bare metal hypervisor, its unmatched scalability depends on underlying hardware, capable of managing large numbers of physical servers with one management platform.
IT Manager at Synergy Computers
vMotion is a daily used technology that allows us to have machines distributed across different sites while maintaining redundancy between the sites.
Managing Partner at evercloud
 

Categories and Ranking

Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (3rd), Container Management (7th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (4th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
VMware ESXi
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Server Virtualization Software category, the mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 3.6%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware ESXi is 2.5%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Virtualization Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware ESXi2.5%
Red Hat OpenShift3.6%
Other93.9%
Server Virtualization Software
 

Featured Reviews

Pratul Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
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.
Gourab Das - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Virtualization has transformed our data center and delivers consistent uptime with seamless maintenance
The most valuable feature VMware ESXi offers me is the user interface and the ease of handling operations without downtime, which is the biggest advantage, particularly with capabilities for live patching, and VCF 9 in patching areas; the bundled licensing provided simplifies management as I can utilize resources based on my needs without worrying too much about individual licenses. The zero-downtime patching is the feature that makes the biggest difference in my day-to-day operations, as well as managing hosts with an n+1 configuration, using a buffer host to streamline maintenance within a cluster of hosts. The vMotion feature is another important aspect, as we opt for auto vMotion to optimize resources within the cluster, enabling the underlying VMs to be moved seamlessly from one host to another based on utilization without impacting applications. VMware ESXi has positively impacted our organization significantly in terms of operations and cost optimization, as we optimized our environment under a per-core license agreement, achieving around 30 to 40% cost-effectiveness and maintaining almost 99.99% uptime across our environment, where VMware ESXi is run on about 85% of our setup. Improvements in operations were made possible through visibility provided by VMware ESXi into hardware enhancements, such as virtual storage platforms with vSAN, which we incorporated into our environment supported by VMware ESXi 9 to enable effective live patching without impacting operations, and we regularly utilize RV tool reports to track actual utilization and optimize resources, reducing our footprint from 100 VMs on 100 hosts to 47 hosts, yielding substantial financial benefits thanks to the support from our VMware ESXi TAM.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Server Virtualization Software solutions are best for your needs.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise53
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

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 needs improvement with OpenShift?
Areas where Red Hat OpenShift can be improved include the licensing being a bit complex and maybe expensive, as that is something in the hands of the organization's higher management, especially wh...
What do you like most about VMware ESXi?
My customers are satisfied with the solution’s performance.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware ESXi?
We recently renewed our VMware ESXi subscription for 14,000 cores, and the total cost was approximately 16 crore for three years. Overall, I found the pricing and licensing process to be very simpl...
What needs improvement with VMware ESXi?
While there is nothing particularly frustrating, a quicker response from VMware ESXi for planning existing hardware implementations of VCF 9 would be beneficial, especially for P1 issues where reso...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat OpenShift vs. VMware ESXi and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.