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Hyper-V vs RHEV 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Server Virtualization Software category, the mindshare of Hyper-V is 14.5%, down from 15.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of RHEV is 3.6%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSphere is 17.3%, down from 19.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Virtualization Software
 

Featured Reviews

Ananth Narayana Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Cost-effective and good for small workloads while addressing update-driven challenges is needed
I use Azure Monitor and other monitoring solutions to support clients in Accenture's managed services. We support multiple environments, primarily on cloud platforms like Azure and AWS, and also on-premises environments with operating systems like Windows, Linux, and Solaris, among others…
Sujeet-Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution is scalable and affordable, but it lacks features, and it is not easy to manage
Management of RHEV is not as easy as VMware. Some features do not work. The product does not provide features similar to VMware’s VMotion. After creating the cluster, the VM is moved to another node if we move down. However, the VM does not move the parent node automatically. It has to be moved manually. VMware moves it automatically. RHEV moves it to the parent node only if we restart. Everything can be handled in VMware through the GUI. However, in RHEV, some things can be managed through UI, and others cannot. We have to troubleshoot and use CLI. A few features of the product do not work as well as those in VMware.
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…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Hyper-V improved the infrastructure drastically, not only from a performance perspective but from a control/administration view as well."
"The simplicity and intuitiveness of the platform. It was a very simple adaptation, if you have any experience in virtualization."
"It's a stable product."
"It makes it easier to deploy service. All service tends to migrate onto the server house without having problems now. It is hardware independent."
"The solution is highly stable."
"I have found the GUI user-friendly and having the solution be a Windows application makes it familiar to users."
"I find the ease of use the most valuable asset of the solution."
"I appreciate its stability and user-friendly management interface."
"It is easy to deal with when comes to application migration and its compatibility with the multiple component applications."
"There aren't any bugs on the solution."
"It's a scalable solution."
"The solution is stable."
"We find the ease of use of this solution to be invaluable. It is user-friendly and integrates well with other software."
"Stability and speed are the most valuable aspects."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support portal."
"The solution has a good licensing module."
"The tool makes virtualization easy. It was free, and we could profit from its GUI. It helps to manage VMs easily."
"VMware vSphere is a very stable product."
"We have removed the need for backups and going to the office at three in the morning to change a server. I do everything during my business hours. It gave me my life back."
"The vMotion feature is beneficial for online migration of virtual machines from one host to another without downtime."
"The scalability of the solution is good. You can scale up to maximum levels."
"VMotion is the biggest feature. It gives us the ability to move things on the fly."
"The most valuable features of VMware vSphere are backup and recovery."
"We can slide in new resources without any impact. We can do maintenance on our clusters without any impact to applications, and we have the flexibility of migrating those workloads to other data centers, when required, in the case of data center downtime."
 

Cons

"Hyper-V doesn't have a lot of features and is limited compared to other virtualization software."
"I think the setup for the Virtual Network Manager could be improved."
"The solution could improve by having virtual restore."
"It would be better if it demanded less memory. Once you have allocated those memory spaces for the installed server, fewer resources are left to allocate for the Hyper-V virtual environment. That's the drawback with that. For example, once you install Windows 10, and let's say Windows 2019, Windows 2019 will take at least 10 GB of memory. If a customer has only 16 GB of RAM on the system, they think of installing Hyper-V. Because when you have windows 2019 or something else, they give two free Hyper-V virtual licenses. But we can't because there's not enough memory. We can, however, install this as a VMS. But this UI isn't that user-friendly for most customers. They like to have a user interface with VMI, and it's not easy when you install VMI. It would also be better if they can improve their core Hyper-V version to be a bit more familiar and user-friendly with its interface. I think it would be much easier. We had a few issues with the VM Hyper-V virtual network. Once you have such issues, it's very difficult to find out where they came from. They had such issues, and we had to resolve the system again. But other than that, if it's useful and keeps working nicely, it will work very nicely even if something happens. But it's very hectic and challenging to find out where it's happening. In the next release, it would be better to control this data store part in a manageable way. This is because once we install and create a Hyper-V machine, it goes everywhere. It would be better if it had a single location and a single folder with a heartbeat and virtual machine information. You can just go forward, and the data store and everything are going into one place like the C drive. But something always goes fast, or everything gets lost if the customer doesn't manually change the direction of where the virtual hard drive routes, the more serious the problem. It would be better if they could merge all that together. This includes the virtual machine and the virtual hard drive in the same folder when creating the virtual machine. I think that it would be much easier to manage and in case something happens. Technical support also could be better."
"The security part of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"When it comes to Hyper-V the worst thing is it's based on the Windows operating system. For the installation of Hyper-V, you're supposed to install the right operating system. For me, it's strange."
"The only issues we have had recently are with Windows updates that are built into the Windows server with Hyper-V."
"It needs to improve the handling of the amount of storage."
"I would love to see better documentation and ease of use."
"The solution has a very small lifecycle."
"Configuring the network interfaces is much better in Ubuntu and should be improved."
"Red Hat by itself is not scalable. But you can have third party add-ons like Ceph to make it massively scalable."
"The documentation is not as good as it should be."
"With RHEV, the cyberattacks should be fewer. I want RHEV to be better protected."
"There is not any proper documentation on the site to reference."
"It lags behind in that you need to go to something like Fedora to get all the extra bells and whistles."
"The HTML 5 client has always lagged behind."
"A fully **automatic** and lightweight Virtual Center. Another time this has a huge improvement in last releases. However, a more automatic and simple deployment is required."
"The solution’s pricing is too high and could be improved."
"The container management could be improved. It's far from perfect right now."
"We need to improve availability and disaster recovery in VMware vSphere."
"I feel that the scalability of the solution should be improved."
"The integration with containers should be addressed."
"There is room for improvement in Google Cloud. The reason thing there was, like, when I type something in the terminal and then immediately, I need to go to edit the certain like file for Node.js, for the server, or for Kubernetes. So I have to do it from the terminal to the editor."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It comes with all the features and goodies inside the box, so you do not have to purchase anything else."
"We have an agreement with Microsoft, so this came with that solution. The pricing is OK for us."
"The pricing is competitive, and a bit less than other options on the market."
"Hyper-V is free when you buy Windows Server. You only have to pay for engaging in the management aspect in System Center."
"Hyper-V is included in the Microsoft Azure license for no extra cost. However, they charge for technical support calls on an hourly basis."
"The product's price is low."
"Licensing cost depends on the edition you choose. There are two main options: Standard and Datacenter. With a Datacenter license, you can only create two virtual machines that are covered by the license itself. You can create more VMs, but they won't be licensed and could result in charges during an audit."
"It's not expensive."
"We have to pay extra for vulnerability and fault tolerance."
"I would say the price is acceptable."
"This is an open-source solution."
"It's a budget product as far as I'm concerned. It's way cheaper than any of its competitors. The only thing cheaper than Red Hat is that the people who take the Red Hat code clone it and then self-support it."
"I believe we pay on a yearly basis."
"We are using the free version of Red Hat."
"The solution does not require licencing but a subscription is necessary, which is very affordable."
"We buy a license for commercial use, and we also use the free editions."
"We pay our licensing fees on a yearly basis."
"Pricing is the one "ding" I have against it. Except for VMware vSphere Essentials, it would be pretty challenging for anything but a medium or large size company to use."
"I did a comparison between physical server to virtual. There was a point in time where we would size out a virtual server to be a massive size, then we'd buy a physical server of the equivalence. We saved somewhere around 20 percent going virtual, as opposed to the physical equivalent."
"It is expensive. Other solutions on the market are free. We had to plan with VMware how many hosts that we needed in order to determine the price."
"The product is expensive."
"If I have three hosts, just three hosts, a minimum of three hosts plus the vSphere and Center, I'm almost spending close to $250,000 a year."
"When comparing the price of VMware solutions to other vendors, such as Nutanix, they are costly."
"It keeps together a lot of different environments, making it easier and faster to work. It definitely has a good turn around."
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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
Educational Organization
35%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
45%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Educational Organization
27%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does KVM compare with Hyper-V?
KVM is better. But let's just look at the software instead of judging. Hyper-V was a free solution from Microsoft to ...
How does Proxmox VE compare with Hyper-V?
One of the best things about Proxmox VE is that it is open-source and very inexpensive. You get all of the same featu...
What do you like most about Hyper-V?
The initial setup is not difficult at all. It is very easy.
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...
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, i...
What needs improvement with RHEV?
My teammates and I often complain that VMware is well-documented and has a large community since it is the de facto s...
What is IOMMU?
DEEPEN DHULLA did explain well IOMMU. IOMMU has to be activated at the bios level. It exists on Intel and AMD platfor...
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...
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 interfa...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Large customer base from all industries, all over the world. Two major Hyper-V customers are Telefonica and EmpireCLS.
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 Proxmox, VMware, Microsoft and others in Server Virtualization Software. Updated: March 2025.
848,989 professionals have used our research since 2012.