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Oracle VM vs VMware vSphere comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

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
7.2
VMware vSphere delivers substantial savings, faster deployment, increased efficiency, and high ROI through reduced hardware and operational costs.
 

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
7.2
VMware vSphere's customer service is praised for expertise but criticized for delayed responses and inconsistent lower-tier support quality.
Priority one issues are usually addressed by engineers within one to two hours.
My team solves most tickets, needing support only about once or twice a year.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Oracle VM scales efficiently meeting diverse needs, though concerns exist over infrastructure limits and licensing costs.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware vSphere excels in scalability, seamlessly integrating new resources for efficient, robust performance across diverse enterprise environments.
Scaling is easy, whether it is hyperconverged or a three-tier architecture.
 

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
8.0
VMware vSphere is praised for stability, with issues usually related to hardware and resolvable through patches and maintenance.
Not every upgrade goes smoothly, and after an upgrade, it sometimes stops working.
It is a very stable hypervisor solution.
 

Room For Improvement

Oracle VM users face stability issues, user interface inconsistencies, limited features, and demand better performance and integration improvements.
VMware vSphere faces criticism for high costs, unresponsive GUI, limited features, poor support, and inadequate security and integration.
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.
Sometimes, it is difficult to find documentation for specific tools and solutions.
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.
 

Setup Cost

Oracle VM is affordable with zero license cost on Oracle hardware, though additional support may incur extra fees.
VMware vSphere offers stability and robust features but is costly, with complex licensing, especially challenging for smaller organizations.
Oracle VM is not a very expensive solution.
Costs significantly increased from perpetual to subscription, with prices rising by two to three times over three to five years.
 

Valuable Features

Oracle VM is praised for its features such as scalability, ease of use, free availability, and comprehensive virtualization capabilities.
VMware vSphere enhances virtualization with seamless VM movement, high availability, resource optimization, scalability, and efficient centralized management, reducing costs.
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 high availability feature is significant.
VMware vCenter is extremely useful as we can manage between 100 and 1,000 hosts using just one management tool.
 

Categories and Ranking

Oracle VM
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware vSphere
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
452
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Server Virtualization Software category, the mindshare of Oracle VM is 7.1%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSphere is 18.1%, down from 19.1% 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.
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…
 

Answers from the Community

NC
Nov 22, 2021
Nov 22, 2021
Oracle VM seems to me to be kind of outdated. Nevertheless, it is fairly straightforward to use and maintain. The solution can just be set and you can forget about it, and the scalability is considered to be quite good. Oracle VM’s customer service and technical support are really outstanding. With this solution, you have the ability to patch with no downtime. Oracle has been around for a long ...
2 out of 3 answers
FM
Nov 17, 2021
VMware VSphere is better than Oracle VM because on Oracle Virtual machine migration is not an easy task as in VSphere due to complications existing in Oracle VM.  Also, Oracle VM is limited in features compared to VMware. Oracle VM is limited also in communicating with other virtualization platforms like VMware.
Janet Staver - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 18, 2021
Oracle VM seems to me to be kind of outdated. Nevertheless, it is fairly straightforward to use and maintain. The solution can just be set and you can forget about it, and the scalability is considered to be quite good. Oracle VM’s customer service and technical support are really outstanding. With this solution, you have the ability to patch with no downtime. Oracle has been around for a long time. It is complete in terms of its features, functionalities, and sophistication. It may provide good documentation and be easy to set up, but it has a terrible licensing structure. Oracle VM may help a company manage its costs, but that can come at another expense for a company - you have to work with an antiquated system. VMware VSphere is fairly priced. Like Oracle VM, it provides near-zero downtime services. I think the way information is monitored needs to be improved. I feel like they need to have a better solution for hybrid clouds and migration to the cloud. It would also be nice to have additional integration options with different solutions at the application level (for example, Kubernetes). One of the biggest issues I have with it, is the firmware management of the underlying hardware. For firmware upgrades, for example, you have to take down your entire system. Even though it makes it easy to create virtual machines, it could be more user-friendly. In addition, the customer service and technical support seem to be average, but nothing spectacular. Overall, I would say that VMware VSphere is pretty stable and implementation is fairly easy. Conclusion:I’m not overly thrilled about either solution, but having had experience with both, I think VMware VSphere is better because it is easy to scale, pretty easy to use, easy to maintain and is mostly stable. And also, while Oracle VM may be more well known, I am not willing to work with an outdated product, especially since there are multiple other modern solutions available.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
47%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Educational Organization
31%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
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, and was quite straight-forward to set up. Since I have been using KVM, I have ...
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 solution can just be set and you can forget about it, and the scalability is consid...
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 that. The subnets are linked to it. So, it's perfectly secured if it's a private n...
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...
 

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,
Abu Dhabi Ports Company, ACS, AIA New Zealand, Consona, Corporate Express, CS Energy, and Digiweb.
Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle VM vs. VMware vSphere and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
832,723 professionals have used our research since 2012.