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RHEV vs VMware vSphere comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

RHEV
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
13th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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 January 2026, in the Server Virtualization Software category, the mindshare of RHEV is 2.4%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSphere is 18.1%, up from 18.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Virtualization Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware vSphere18.1%
RHEV2.4%
Other79.5%
Server Virtualization Software
 

Featured Reviews

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

"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."
"Customers are moving to open source and Red Hat is the leader in this particular space. I think customers feel more confident running Red Hat Virtualization than VMware."
"I can control and manage everything. I know everything that's cooking inside. This is the best part for me."
"I advise keeping an open mind. It's an excellent solution."
"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."
"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."
"It's a scalable solution."
"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."
"The ability to create or clone a virtual environment in a short period of time for testing is most valuable."
"The ease of movement of these machines is the most valuable. It is very easy to move these machines between physical hosts. The fast deployment of services is another valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature is vSAN, as it reduces the cost of SAN storage and maintenance."
"vMotion is one of the most useful features, which helps to provide both flexibility and High Availability. With new versions of vSphere and vCenter, it is still improving (e.g., vMotion across vCenter Servers and virtual switches)."
"Technical support is helpful and always available."
"The performance is efficient."
"Our customers opt for virtualization because it's cheaper and better than non-virtualized solutions. VMware is probably the best on the market now."
"The solution is user-friendly and easy to manage."
 

Cons

"RHEV is not improving because it has been discontinued. It has been discontinued for years."
"RHEV is not improving because it has been discontinued. It has been discontinued for years."
"Customers are not aware of this solution, they can improve by providing more awareness and solution availability."
"There is not any proper documentation on the site to reference."
"We hope that Red Hat can produce a paradigm edition. We are looking for paradigm computing and paradigm storage. Its scalability can be improved. It is not easy to scale, and we hope that Red Hat can provide a more scalable system. They should also provide local service and support. Our customers are looking for a good software vendor to provide professional services."
"The Administration of the Oracle database and the SAP ERP needs improvement."
"I heard that there are big differences between Red Hat eight and seven, but it's still quite difficult for me to judge it. I found it a bit more difficult to manage than version seven, which was much easier. In term of features, though, it is still not yet clear which is better. I have no clear idea of which features need to be changed at the moment."
"RHEV can improve by keeping pace with new features and new enhancements. They should not be halted or delayed innovation because over the past quarter the enhancements have not been as fast as they have been previously."
"I would like to see more support regarding containers, and they need more features for them."
"I would like to see the UI incorporating all of the functionality that the thick client had."
"There needs to be more integration overall. That would be quite helpful."
"Security and patch-related items need improvement."
"It could be more composable. At present, a fluid pool is not available to us. It would be great to have the flexibility."
"I would like to see a more automated upgrade, where you take the other products into account, so you can upgrade the entire VMware stack from a single interface."
"As we introduce the DevOps culture, we need to make sure that the principles and tools used to support this approach can be easily integrated and interoperated with the vSphere environment with no (or less) redundancy in tools and functionality."
"the HTML version of things needs to get a little bit better. The vSphere side of things gets a little difficult to manage; right-click, in some browsers, doesn't work as well as it used to. I'm seeing a little bit of general latency that we didn't used to get with the thick client, although it's getting there."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"I would say the price is acceptable."
"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 have to pay extra for vulnerability and fault tolerance."
"The solution does not require licencing but a subscription is necessary, which is very affordable."
"RHEV offers pricing based on a per-physical-machine licensing model."
"Its price depends on the use cases."
"The solution’s licensing terms keep changing, which is too complex for our customers."
"The price could improve for the enterprise versions."
"The license growth of vSphere depends on the growth of the visual environment and the addition of more hosts."
"It saves us money because we don't have to buy as many physical servers."
"When comparing the price of VMware solutions to other vendors, such as Nutanix, they are costly."
"The solution's licensing is costlier than other hypervisors."
"We pay for the solution on an annual basis. There are no additional fees other than the standard license."
"I'm satisfied with the VMware vSphere price. They have a bundle that is priced well. However, any advantage feature is very costly."
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Comparison Review

VL
CIO at Robusta Technology & Training
Jan 13, 2015
vSphere vs. RHEV vs. Hyper-V vs. XenServer
We have used the following functions: 1. Hypervisor: to ensure that the virtual server provide web and email services to the company, thus providing a stable operation a with single sign-on integration of an AD server and vCenter. 2. Network and Storage: centralized data server…
 

Answers from the Community

SB
VP-Global Supply Chain Management at mobileum
Feb 7, 2024
Feb 7, 2024
Hi Sridhar, This is Rajkumar Gera, VP IT in one of the Telecom. Below are some of the points, may help you: FEATURE RED HAT ENTERPRISE VIRTUALIZATION VMWARE VSPHERE Key differentiators Open source solution Proprietary solution Purchased via one subscription Multiple levels o...
See 2 answers
Anne Cubarrubia - PeerSpot reviewer
Editor at PeerSpot
Aug 21, 2023
Here is a comparison of the two hypervisors, RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) and VMware vSphere: RHEV Pros: Open source Highly scalable Cost-effective Cons: Not as mature as VMware vSphere Not as widely supported as VMware vSphere VMware vSphere Pros: Mature and widely supported Wide range of features Easy to use and manage Cons: Not open source Can be expensive Some prefer RHEV because it is open-source and cost-effective. However, VMware vSphere may be the better option if you need a hypervisor with a wide range of features and support. As to which solution consumes fewer resources, RHEV is a lighter-weight hypervisor than VMware vSphere, so it consumes fewer resources. However, you must remember that each hypervisor's resource consumption depends on the configuration and workload.
RG
Vice President, IT Infrastructure ( DC Operations ) at Vodafone Idea Ltd.
Feb 7, 2024
Hi Sridhar,    This is Rajkumar Gera, VP IT  in one of the Telecom. Below are some of the points, may help you:  FEATURE RED HAT ENTERPRISE VIRTUALIZATION VMWARE VSPHERE Key differentiators Open source solution Proprietary solution Purchased via one subscription Multiple levels of functionality sold in editions with different price points Bare-metal performance for virtualized applications Application high availability (Enterprise Plus version only) Prioritized high availability so critical workloads are restarted first Desktop and server virtualization One infrastructure for managing desktops and servers Add-on products for desktop virtualization: VMware Player, VMware Horizon View, VMware Horizon DaaS, and VMware Horizon Mirage Remote access to virtual desktops through SPICE Full support for multimedia applications Management server Included in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization subscription Requires purchase and license of VMware vCenter and database support Virtual machine density 40 cores: 4,682@288 40 cores: 3,824@234 160 cores: 14,061@864 160 cores: result not available Self-service portal Allows users to provision and manage VMs and templates with a browser Requires the purchase of VMware vCloud Automation Center Integration with OpenStack technology Supports the open Neutron pluggable networking API Supports VMware’s NSX networking plug-in Supports the OpenStack image service for a unified image repository between virtual and cloud platforms Does not support the OpenStack image service
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business175
Midsize Enterprise137
Large Enterprise256
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about RHEV?
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.
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, it's negligible.
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 into RHEV, but the job market is difficult and no one is hiring. RHEV is designe...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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 RHEV vs. VMware vSphere and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
880,481 professionals have used our research since 2012.