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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
7.8
Red Hat OpenShift improves productivity, offers cost savings, enhances system stability, and provides 15% ROI, especially in privacy-focused sectors.
Sentiment score
7.2
VMware vSphere reduces costs and enhances efficiency with virtualization, offering savings, agility, and improved resource utilization and scalability.
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
6.8
Red Hat OpenShift support is mixed, praised for expertise but criticized for slow responses and varying experiences based on subscription.
Sentiment score
7.0
VMware vSphere's customer service is efficient and knowledgeable, but response times and complex issue handling can be inconsistent.
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.
Priority one issues are usually addressed by engineers within one to two hours.
Recently, support has been less friendly and slower, especially after the company was acquired by Broadcom.
If we have issues, the support tends to be unreliable
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Red Hat OpenShift offers efficient scalability with automated features, easy deployment, and adaptability, despite cost and infrastructure considerations.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware vSphere offers scalable, flexible environments with minimal downtime, seamless integration, and excellent performance across diverse hardware and business needs.
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.
Scaling is easy, whether it is hyperconverged or a three-tier architecture.
VMware vSphere is highly scalable in terms of the number of users and the number of servers it can handle.
It is a highly scalable solution.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Red Hat OpenShift is praised for stability, reliability, and features like Blue-Green deployment, with minor issues quickly resolved.
Sentiment score
8.0
VMware vSphere is highly stable and reliable, with minimal outages and quick resolution of issues, ideal for critical applications.
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.
It is a very stable hypervisor solution.
While they are generally stable, if outages occur, they tend to be due to brands like HP or Dell, not VMware vSphere itself.
I would rate the stability of VMware vSphere as eight out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

Red Hat OpenShift needs better documentation, improved usability, and enhancements in security, integration, technical support, and installation processes.
VMware vSphere needs pricing, interface, compatibility, management, integration, fault tolerance, performance, and technology support improvements due to user concerns.
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.
The cost changed from perpetual to subscription, and there is a need for alternative solutions.
Another area is the stability during upgrades from older versions to newer versions, where we face issues.
Sometimes, it is difficult to find documentation for specific tools and solutions.
 

Setup Cost

Red Hat OpenShift pricing is high but potentially cost-effective for large enterprises, offering comprehensive support and enterprise capabilities.
VMware vSphere is costly but valued for advanced features and stability, especially in large-scale environments, warranting careful budgeting.
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.
Many customers are trying to avoid it due to its high cost.
Costs significantly increased from perpetual to subscription, with prices rising by two to three times over three to five years.
The solution is too expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Red Hat OpenShift is valued for its security, scalability, automation, multi-cloud flexibility, and efficient management interface.
VMware vSphere offers centralized management and flexibility, enhancing data center efficiency with strong security and fast, efficient operations.
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.
The vMotion feature is beneficial for online migration of virtual machines from one host to another without downtime.
The tool is highly available, which is crucial for implementing critical applications requiring 24/7 availability.
The high availability feature is significant.
 

Categories and Ranking

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)
VMware vSphere
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
454
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Server Virtualization Software category, the mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 1.6%. The mindshare of VMware vSphere is 16.2%, down from 20.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Virtualization Software
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Neeraj Mehra - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamlines virtualization and has features like high availability and vMotion
The primary use case is for virtualization, including the implementation of vSphere, vCloud Foundation, vCloud Director, and cloud automation with vSphere My customers, particularly SMBs, mainly utilize High Availability (HA), DRS, and vMotion features. The vMotion feature is beneficial for…
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Comparison Review

it_user234735 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
30%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
Educational Organization
19%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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.
What is the biggest difference between Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSphere?
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...
 

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: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.