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Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 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
8.0
Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers high ROI with cost savings, improved efficiency, strong support, and enhanced stability for enterprises.
Sentiment score
7.2
VMware vSphere enables cost savings by reducing physical servers, optimizing resources, and decreasing setup time and operational costs.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has saved us time and increased productivity.
Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux can yield resource savings of 200 percent to 300 percent compared to Windows Server instances.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.0
RHEL support is highly rated for its knowledgeable team, timely responses, and robust problem-solving, despite occasional delays.
Sentiment score
7.2
VMware vSphere's support is praised for knowledgeable service but criticized for variable response times and declining quality over time.
They respond immediately based on the SLA level.
The technical support is excellent.
They promptly addressed my concerns regarding permission issues when I contacted them.
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
7.8
Red Hat Enterprise Linux excels in scalability, managing diverse environments and workloads efficiently with seamless integration and reliable performance.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware vSphere offers seamless scalability and flexibility, efficiently handling large environments with minimal performance issues and strategic adaptability.
There are no issues with scalability when it comes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Each computer has at least 24 to 72 CPUs in it, and everything runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Rocky.
I would rate the scalability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as nine out of ten, indicating it scales well with our needs.
Scaling is easy, whether it is hyperconverged or a three-tier architecture.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
RHEL is highly stable and reliable, favored for business-critical applications due to long uptimes and minimal issues.
Sentiment score
8.0
VMware vSphere is highly stable and reliable, with minor issues often due to hardware or third-party integrations.
It works consistently with minimal downtime and very few bugs or glitches.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers great stability and performance compared to other operating systems.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very stable.
It is a very stable hypervisor solution.
 

Room For Improvement

RHEL users desire improvements in documentation, usability, security, automation, compatibility, and support to enhance overall user experience.
VMware vSphere users seek improvements in cost, support, interface, integration, performance, setup complexity, automation, documentation, and fault tolerance.
Addressing these limitations would significantly enhance the operating system's flexibility and efficiency.
The built-in security features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux were insufficient for our needs, necessitating the implementation of supplementary security measures.
By providing pre-installed, native automation tools within the operating system, Red Hat would streamline processes and improve user efficiency.
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 Enterprise Linux's pricing is justified by its support and features, yet smaller companies consider alternatives for cost savings.
VMware vSphere pricing is high but offers value in stability; consult VMware or resellers to customize licensing.
It may be considered expensive compared to other solutions like CentOS or Ubuntu, which offer some of the same features without additional costs.
Its pricing has room for improvement because it's more expensive in the local market due to purchasing power parity in India.
Windows Servers base their cost on the number of users and have high licensing fees, while Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers free versions alongside its paid, supported versions.
Costs significantly increased from perpetual to subscription, with prices rising by two to three times over three to five years.
 

Valuable Features

Red Hat Enterprise Linux excels in stability, security, and usability with strong automation tools and support, ideal for diverse infrastructures.
VMware vSphere excels in ease of use, robust features, and efficient resource management, ideal for diverse virtualization needs.
It also has strong security features, is OIS and FIPS certified, and has built-in Linux security configurations.
The security features are the most valuable.
The most valuable feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is its command-line capabilities, which allow you to execute large operations quickly.
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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (R...
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
263
Ranking in other categories
Operating Systems (OS) for Business (1st)
VMware vSphere
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
452
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and VMware vSphere aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is designed for Operating Systems (OS) for Business and holds a mindshare of 11.8%, down 12.2% compared to last year.
VMware vSphere, on the other hand, focuses on Server Virtualization Software, holds 19.4% mindshare, up 18.9% since last year.
Operating Systems (OS) for Business
Server Virtualization Software
 

Featured Reviews

Bruce Lundberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable patch management, high uptime, and incredible knowledge base
In terms of security, it does a lot of things that most people still turn off. SELinux is turned on by default. They have pretty good firewall rules in their defaults. The audit rules always take tweaking, but, overall, it comes out of the box not too bad. I used to write scripts to harden them from there. There are multiple ways to provision and patch. You have everything from local repositories to doing it by hand. Their knowledge base is incredible. There is so much information out there. It has never taken me longer than 30 minutes to find an answer to anything, even very tough ones. One company I worked for was a security company, and we did a lot of patching on everything. It was designed around security and email hosting, and uptime was pretty much whatever we wanted it to be. I have had a couple of times when the uptime was bad, but it was caused by a third-party solution. In fact, the Norton antivirus was definitely the worst. Red Hat had nothing to do with it.
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
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
Educational Organization
30%
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 would you choose - RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) or CentOS?
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is fantastic. It is an inexpensive solution that has excellent security, performance, and stability, and also lots of features. I specifically like that the solution has fe...
What do you like most about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?
It is open source. We can customize it as per our requirements.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?
I do not have any insights, but I know why the prices went up. At the time, it made sense. I do not know what the pricing is like now. Previously, the pricing model was advantageous as it allowed u...
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...
 

Also Known As

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Travel Channel, Mohawk Industries, Hilti, Molecular Health, Exolgan, Hotelplan Group, Emory University, BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina, HCA Healthcare, Paychex, UPS, Intermountain Healthcare, Brinker International, TransUnion, Union Bank, CA Technologies
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, Canonical, Oracle and others in Operating Systems (OS) for Business. Updated: December 2024.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.