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Red Hat OpenShift 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
7.8
Red Hat OpenShift boosts productivity, scalability, and efficiency, enhancing deployment and reducing costs through containerization and streamlined cloud transitions.
Sentiment score
7.2
VMware vSphere reduces costs by improving server efficiency, management, and resource use, offering quick financial returns despite initial investment.
With OpenShift combined with IBM Cloud App integration, I can spin an integration server in a second as compared to traditional methods, which could take days or weeks.
Moving to OpenShift resulted in increased system stability and reduced downtime, which contributed to operational efficiency.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
Red Hat OpenShift support varies; praised for premium service and community help, criticized for slow responses and complex documentation.
Sentiment score
7.1
VMware vSphere customer service is responsive and knowledgeable, with occasional issues in timeliness and engineer quality variability.
Red Hat's technical support is responsive and effective.
I have been pretty happy in the past with getting support from Red Hat.
We have dealt with many cases with Red Hat support, and while they eventually solve issues, it sometimes takes them a long time to reach a resolution, particularly with complex matters related to IBM Cloud.
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
7.6
Red Hat OpenShift is praised for scalability, dynamic scaling, and seamless integration, though some seek competitive improvements.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware vSphere is scalable and adaptable, efficiently managing large deployments and increasing workloads, though licensing and compatibility are challenges.
The on-demand provisioning of pods and auto-scaling, whether horizontal or vertical, is the best part.
OpenShift's horizontal pod scaling is more effective and efficient than that used in Kubernetes, making it a superior choice for scalability.
Red Hat OpenShift scales excellently, with a rating of ten out of ten.
Scaling is easy, whether it is hyperconverged or a three-tier architecture.
It is a highly scalable solution.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Red Hat OpenShift is highly rated for stability and reliability, with improvements in version 4.x enhancing performance for production use.
Sentiment score
8.0
VMware vSphere is praised for stability and reliability, with minimal downtime and issues mainly due to hardware or misconfigurations.
It provides better performance yet requires more resources compared to vanilla Kubernetes.
I've had my cluster running for over four years.
It performs well under load, providing the desired output.
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 OpenShift requires enhanced documentation, simplified configuration, improved integration, better security, and cost-effective infrastructure solutions.
VMware vSphere users highlight complex management, high licensing costs, and desire improvements in fault tolerance, UI, and support.
Learning OpenShift requires complex infrastructure, needing vCenter integration, more advanced answers, active directory, and more expensive hardware.
We should aim to include VMware-like capabilities to be competitive, especially considering cost factors.
The removal of Grafana and HPA from monitoring caused some issues.
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 OpenShift pricing is high but offers value and scalability, with costs justified by support and integration benefits.
VMware vSphere offers robust features and stability but is often criticized for its complex and expensive pricing and licensing.
Red Hat can improve on the pricing part by making it more flexible and possibly on the lower side.
The cost of OpenShift is very high, particularly with the OpenShift Plus package, which includes many products and services.
The cost is a crucial factor, particularly with licensing.
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

Red Hat OpenShift excels in deployment, automation, security, and integration, offering multi-cloud flexibility and strong customer support.
VMware vSphere enhances server virtualization with seamless VM migration, resource efficiency, scalability, and robust management for cost-effective infrastructure optimization.
The concept of containers and scaling on demand is a feature I appreciate the most about Red Hat OpenShift.
A valuable feature of Red Hat OpenShift is its ability to handle increased loads by automatically adding nodes.
It has features that enhance security, ease of deployment, and service exposure compared to Kubernetes.
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 OpenShift
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
60
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (3rd), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (7th)
VMware vSphere
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
453
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Server Virtualization Software category, the mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 0.7%. The mindshare of VMware vSphere is 17.8%, down from 19.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Virtualization Software
 

Featured Reviews

Mikhael Ibrahim - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamlessly monitor microservices with streamlined DevOps capabilities
Most benefit from it, however, I work with Kubernetes, and installing Vanilla Kubernetes is easy. That said, it introduces many tools that need to be set up individually. OpenShift comes ready out of the box, with all tools installed and configured. Red Hat certifies and confirms that all the components are compatible with each other. OpenShift's superior dashboard is a notable strength, especially when compared to Kubernetes. The integrated DevOps capabilities, such as pipelines and the container registry, are extremely beneficial. Additionally, its capability to monitor microservices and containers with integrated tools like Prometheus is a major advantage. The horizontal pod scaling exceeds the scalability features I found in Kubernetes.
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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842,194 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
Financial Services Firm
32%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
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

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...
Which would you recommend - Pivotal Cloud Foundry or OpenShift?
Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a cloud-native application platform to simplify app delivery. It is efficient and effective. The best feature is how easy it is to handle external services such as database...
What do you like most about OpenShift?
OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.
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...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
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 OpenShift vs. VMware vSphere and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,194 professionals have used our research since 2012.