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Red Hat OpenShift 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.4
Red Hat OpenShift boosts productivity and ROI, with improved scalability, resource utilization, and reduced costs compared to VMware.
Sentiment score
6.9
VMware vSphere reduces costs and boosts efficiency by minimizing physical servers, speeding deployment, and saving electricity and hardware.
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
It is always advisable to get the bare minimum that you need, and then add more when necessary.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
We can say 10% is the approximate amount of savings because most of the things are automated and streamlined, so the manual work is eliminated in most cases.
Sr. Technical Architect at StarOne IT Solutions
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Red Hat OpenShift support is mixed, with praise for premium options but concerns over response times and documentation consistency.
Sentiment score
6.7
VMware vSphere's customer service is friendly and available, though response times and escalation for complex issues vary.
Red Hat's technical support is responsive and effective.
Infrastructure Manager at Appzone Group
I have been pretty happy in the past with getting support from Red Hat.
Manager IT Infrastructure at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Red Hat's technical support is good, and I would rate it a nine out of ten.
Senior Technical Lead at MORO
Priority one issues are usually addressed by engineers within one to two hours.
Server Support Engineer at CIPL - Corporate Infotech Pvt Ltd
Recently, support has been less friendly and slower, especially after the company was acquired by Broadcom.
Revenue Operations Specialist at KK AGC
If we have issues, the support tends to be unreliable
Technical Assistant at EOCD
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Red Hat OpenShift is scalable, easy to deploy, integrates well, supports thousands of users, and suits large organizations.
Sentiment score
7.3
VMware vSphere offers exceptional scalability, flexibility, and performance, making it ideal for diverse enterprise needs and large-scale environments.
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
Scaling is easy, whether it is hyperconverged or a three-tier architecture.
Manager of Solutions and Support at Esconet Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
VMware vSphere is highly scalable in terms of the number of users and the number of servers it can handle.
Revenue Operations Specialist at KK AGC
It is a highly scalable solution.
Technical Assistant at EOCD
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Red Hat OpenShift is stable and reliable, despite past issues, with high resource needs for optimal performance.
Sentiment score
7.9
VMware vSphere is stable and reliable, with minimal crashes, responsive support, and effectively manages updates with improved stability.
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
It performs well under load, providing the desired output.
System Analyst at Freelancer
It is a very stable hypervisor solution.
Manager of Solutions and Support at Esconet Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
While they are generally stable, if outages occur, they tend to be due to brands like HP or Dell, not VMware vSphere itself.
Revenue Operations Specialist at KK AGC
Mostly we don't have issues, but sometimes we have faced some stability issues because of some bugs and some CPU compatibility issues with Intel CPUs.
IT Director at Def Industry
 

Room For Improvement

Red Hat OpenShift faces challenges in usability, security, integration, and documentation, requiring enhancements in scaling, setup, and multi-cloud support.
VMware vSphere's costly, complex interface faces stability and integration issues, with inadequate documentation and reliance on Flash problematic.
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
We should aim to include VMware-like capabilities to be competitive, especially considering cost factors.
System Analyst at Freelancer
The cost changed from perpetual to subscription, and there is a need for alternative solutions.
Manager of Solutions and Support at Esconet Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Another area is the stability during upgrades from older versions to newer versions, where we face issues.
Manager of Systems at Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology
Sometimes, it is difficult to find documentation for specific tools and solutions.
Server Support Engineer at CIPL - Corporate Infotech Pvt Ltd
 

Setup Cost

Red Hat OpenShift is seen as costly, with competitive enterprise pricing but restrictive for smaller organizations; alternatives may be cheaper.
VMware vSphere is seen as costly, with complex licensing, although valued for stability and features compared to competitors.
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
Red Hat can improve on the pricing part by making it more flexible and possibly on the lower side.
Manager IT Infrastructure at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Many customers are trying to avoid it due to its high cost.
Technical Assistant at EOCD
Costs significantly increased from perpetual to subscription, with prices rising by two to three times over three to five years.
Manager of Solutions and Support at Esconet Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
The solution is too expensive.
Revenue Operations Specialist at KK AGC
 

Valuable Features

Red Hat OpenShift excels with fast CI/CD, scalability, strong security, and seamless DevOps integration for large projects.
VMware vSphere excels in availability, scalability, and management with features like vMotion, DRS, and robust security.
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 concept of containers and scaling on demand is a feature I appreciate the most about Red Hat OpenShift.
Manager IT Infrastructure at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
A valuable feature of Red Hat OpenShift is its ability to handle increased loads by automatically adding nodes.
System Analyst at Freelancer
The vMotion feature is beneficial for online migration of virtual machines from one host to another without downtime.
Manager of Solutions and Support at Esconet Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
The tool is highly available, which is crucial for implementing critical applications requiring 24/7 availability.
Revenue Operations Specialist at KK AGC
I always use VMware vSphere vMotion; we work with this feature all the time. vMotion is very useful; that's why we use the virtualization.
IT Director at Def Industry
 

Categories and Ranking

Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (3rd), Container Management (10th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
VMware vSphere
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
457
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Server Virtualization Software category, the mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 3.6%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSphere is 17.4%, down from 18.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Virtualization Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware vSphere17.4%
Red Hat OpenShift3.6%
Other79.0%
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.
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.
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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
Financial Services Firm
26%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise41
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business175
Midsize Enterprise137
Large Enterprise256
 

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 do you like most about OpenShift?
OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.
What is IOMMU?
DEEPEN DHULLA did explain well IOMMU. IOMMU has to be activated at the bios level. It exists on Intel and AMD platforms. It is used a lot inside virtualization platforms like VMware VSphere. It pr...
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 and Windows. For us, VMware does not offer any advantage. Moreover, KVM is free.
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 of handling and management. However, KVM-based Open Source solutions are becoming...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Abu Dhabi Ports Company, ACS, AIA New Zealand, Consona, Corporate Express, CS Energy, and Digiweb.
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat OpenShift vs. VMware vSphere and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,259 professionals have used our research since 2012.