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Oracle VM vs Proxmox VE 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
7.7
Users reported mixed ROI from Oracle VM, noting low costs and savings, while some found it expensive and challenging to assess.
Sentiment score
7.5
Proxmox VE offers cost savings, enhanced server capabilities, and improved efficiency, with benefits outweighing its learning curve challenges.
Sentiment score
7.2
VMware vSphere reduces costs and enhances efficiency with virtualization, offering savings, agility, and improved resource utilization and scalability.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.0
Oracle VM support improved over time; users appreciate knowledgeable staff, effective issue resolution, and global support availability.
Sentiment score
7.4
Proxmox VE users often utilize community resources and documentation over paid support, though improved direct communication is desired.
Sentiment score
7.0
VMware vSphere's customer service is efficient and knowledgeable, but response times and complex issue handling can be inconsistent.
If we have issues, the support tends to be unreliable
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.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Oracle VM scales efficiently meeting diverse needs, though concerns exist over infrastructure limits and licensing costs.
Sentiment score
7.2
Proxmox VE is praised for its scalability, ease of resource addition, and seamless migrations, though vertical scaling could improve.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware vSphere offers scalable, flexible environments with minimal downtime, seamless integration, and excellent performance across diverse hardware and business needs.
VMware vSphere is highly scalable in terms of the number of users and the number of servers it can handle.
Scaling is easy, whether it is hyperconverged or a three-tier architecture.
It is a highly scalable solution.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Oracle VM stability depends on configuration; certified hardware and proper setups enhance performance, reducing upgrade and compatibility issues.
Sentiment score
8.1
Proxmox VE is highly stable and reliable, performing well on older hardware with minimal performance issues.
Sentiment score
8.0
VMware vSphere is highly stable and reliable, with minimal outages and quick resolution of issues, ideal for critical applications.
Not every upgrade goes smoothly, and after an upgrade, it sometimes stops working.
While they are generally stable, if outages occur, they tend to be due to brands like HP or Dell, not VMware vSphere itself.
It is a very stable hypervisor solution.
I would rate the stability of VMware vSphere as eight out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

Oracle VM users face stability issues, user interface inconsistencies, limited features, and demand better performance and integration improvements.
Proxmox VE faces challenges with performance, interface complexity, support, and lacks effective monitoring, documentation, and scalability features.
VMware vSphere needs pricing, interface, compatibility, management, integration, fault tolerance, performance, and technology support improvements due to user concerns.
If I have limited systems and there is maintenance on the hardware, the Oracle systems are impacted.
Not every upgrade goes smoothly, and after an upgrade, it sometimes stops working.
Although the product is very strong and includes all necessary features, the high pricing drives many customers to avoid using it.
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

Oracle VM is affordable with zero license cost on Oracle hardware, though additional support may incur extra fees.
Proxmox VE is an open-source, cost-effective virtualization solution with optional support, valued for its affordability against competitors.
VMware vSphere is costly but valued for advanced features and stability, especially in large-scale environments, warranting careful budgeting.
Oracle VM is not a very expensive solution.
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.
About three or four years ago, I would have recommended VMware vSphere more strongly, but currently, the price and licensing issues are deterrents.
 

Valuable Features

Oracle VM is praised for its features such as scalability, ease of use, free availability, and comprehensive virtualization capabilities.
Proxmox VE provides a user-friendly, scalable, and affordable virtualization solution with strong community support and feature-rich environment.
VMware vSphere offers centralized management and flexibility, enhancing data center efficiency with strong security and fast, efficient operations.
If there is an issue with the operating system running on top of it, there's no primary and secondary domain, rather segregated I/Os, disks, memory, everything assigned to a logical domain.
It is easy to copy or clone one Oracle workstation to another.
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 vSphere application is free and very useful, ensuring effective management and improvement in operations.
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Server Virtualization Software category, the mindshare of Oracle VM is 7.2%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Proxmox VE is 18.1%, down from 20.7% 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

Robin Saikat Chatterjee - PeerSpot reviewer
Low cost robust VM soln with ability to patch with no downtime and free Live migration
The ability to live migrate VMs on the fly from one hypervisor to another has been very useful.The ability to pin cores to reduce licensing costs for our clients runnning core based oracel producs is also invaluable.One important factor to note is that to use live migration its important to create specifc pools devoted to certain products for exampel a pool for weblogic and a separate server pool for database. live migration is not permitted when using cpu pinnning to reduce license costs.
Toby Champion - PeerSpot reviewer
Ensures a robust, user-friendly virtualization platform with seamless VM management, efficient resource allocation and a strong community for support
Improvements are needed for the API. Currently, there are several features inaccessible through the API, necessitating the use of either the WebUI or the command line interface. While the command line interface suffices, it's apparent that efforts are underway to enhance this aspect. In future releases, one potential feature enhancement could be improved remote screen access, allowing users to connect to the screen of another machine more seamlessly. Additionally, integrating with Terraform or providing better support for Terraform workflows might be beneficial, as there seems to be some lacking in that area. There's a minor inconvenience where you have to switch the license file from the open-source community license to an enterprise license.
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
Educational Organization
43%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
26%
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

Which is better - Oracle VM or KVM?
I would prefer if KVM was easier to scale and not so limited. Overall the product has been helpful. It is easy to use...
Which is better - Oracle VM or VMware VSphere?
Oracle VM seems to me to be kind of outdated. Nevertheless, it is fairly straightforward to use and maintain. The sol...
What do you like most about Oracle VM?
If you want to access the VM from anywhere over the Internet, you put it in a public subnet. So, VMs are linked to th...
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 o...
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...
Proxmox VE or KVM?
I use Proxmox VE and have been very happy with it. In my opinion, it is a complete and stable solution with excellent...
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

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ambulance Victoria, Australian Finance Group (AFG), Avnet Technology Solutions, CERN, cloudKleyer, Danish Tax Authority (SKAT), Data Intensity, Dubai World, Engineers Australia, Enkitec, Groupe FLO, Guerra S.A. Implemento, s Rodovišrios, Interactive One, IT Convergence, Jesta Digital, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, KT, Kyoto Prefecture, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory / National Ignition Facility, Multinet Pakistan, National Australia Bank (NAB), Navis LLC, Overhead Door, Overstock.com, Paragon Data, Parks Victoria, Pella, Sunway Shared Services, St. Louis Metro, Terminales Ro de la Plata S.A., University of Massachusetts, Versace,
Municipality of Trento, SwitchMIA, inDenova, Valmeita City Council, Alpha IT AS, Grupo Inversor Veracruzano S.A.P.I. de C.V. (GRIVER), Laut und Schoen, IT-Services - Hamburg e.K., KMI Learning, Dynacom Tankers Management Ltd., Serwise AG
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.
849,475 professionals have used our research since 2012.