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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
7.6
Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers cost savings, efficiency, and enhanced productivity through reliability, automation, community support, and scalability.
Sentiment score
7.2
VMware vSphere reduces costs by improving server efficiency, management, and resource use, offering quick financial returns despite initial investment.
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.
It helps them meet the requirements of having commercial support, and that is about the extent of it.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.8
Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides proficient support, with high ratings but occasional delays in complex cases and time zone issues.
Sentiment score
7.1
VMware vSphere customer service is responsive and knowledgeable, with occasional issues in timeliness and engineer quality variability.
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.
If we have issues, the support tends to be unreliable
My team solves most tickets, needing support only about once or twice a year.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Red Hat Enterprise Linux excels in scalability, performance, and adaptability across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments for enterprises.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware vSphere is scalable and adaptable, efficiently managing large deployments and increasing workloads, though licensing and compatibility are challenges.
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.
Switching between vendors requires a significant migration effort.
Scaling is easy, whether it is hyperconverged or a three-tier architecture.
It is a highly scalable solution.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is praised for its stability, reliability, and efficiency, though third-party software integration may pose challenges.
Sentiment score
8.0
VMware vSphere is praised for stability and reliability, with minimal downtime and issues mainly due to hardware or misconfigurations.
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.
I would rate the stability of VMware vSphere as eight out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

Red Hat Enterprise Linux requires improvements in user-friendliness, compatibility, support, pricing, and enhanced features like automation and security.
VMware vSphere users highlight complex management, high licensing costs, and desire improvements in fault tolerance, UI, and support.
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 high, but its strong support and stability are valued by larger organizations.
VMware vSphere offers robust features and stability but is often criticized for its complex and expensive pricing and 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.
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.
 

Valuable Features

RHEL offers stability, security, enterprise support, and tools for efficient management, ideal for mission-critical and diverse environments.
VMware vSphere enhances server virtualization with seamless VM migration, resource efficiency, scalability, and robust management for cost-effective infrastructure optimization.
It also has strong security features, is OIS and FIPS certified, and has built-in Linux security configurations.
There is also no downtime.
The operating system allows for the simple addition of kernels, modules, and other applications, making it highly adaptable to various needs.
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
7.3
Number of Reviews
271
Ranking in other categories
Operating Systems (OS) for Business (1st)
VMware vSphere
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
453
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 10.2%, down 12.3% compared to last year.
VMware vSphere, on the other hand, focuses on Server Virtualization Software, holds 17.8% mindshare, down 19.5% 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
11%
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)?
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is more expensive compared to other operating systems. The license for cloud deployments is more affordable than the on-premises version.
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
No data available
 

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: March 2025.
842,296 professionals have used our research since 2012.