Red Hat OpenShift vs. VMware ESXi

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.
$0.08
per hour
VMware ESXi
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
A bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly onto a physical server. With direct access to and control of underlying resources, VMware ESXi partitions hardware to consolidate applications and cut costs.N/A
Pricing
Red Hat OpenShiftVMware ESXi
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Red Hat OpenShiftVMware ESXi
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Red Hat OpenShiftVMware ESXi
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Red Hat OpenShiftVMware ESXi
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Red Hat OpenShift
7.7
91 Ratings
6% below category average
VMware ESXi
-
Ratings
Ease of building user interfaces7.575 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability8.691 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform management overhead6.783 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability7.274 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control7.685 Ratings00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration7.677 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment creation8.083 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment replication7.778 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification7.181 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue recovery7.980 Ratings00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes8.384 Ratings00 Ratings
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
Red Hat OpenShift
-
Ratings
VMware ESXi
8.7
127 Ratings
4% above category average
Virtual machine automated provisioning00 Ratings8.5115 Ratings
Management console00 Ratings8.8127 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup00 Ratings8.4111 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration00 Ratings9.3115 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security00 Ratings8.4116 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Red Hat OpenShiftVMware ESXi
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.7 out of 10
Proxmox VE
Proxmox VE
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Red Hat OpenShiftVMware ESXi
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(100 ratings)
9.1
(128 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.9
(9 ratings)
10.0
(6 ratings)
Usability
8.4
(7 ratings)
9.1
(5 ratings)
Availability
5.5
(1 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Performance
7.8
(20 ratings)
9.2
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
7.4
(8 ratings)
9.8
(55 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.6
(2 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.8
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
7.4
(2 ratings)
5.8
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.8
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Professional Services
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Red Hat OpenShiftVMware ESXi
Likelihood to Recommend
Red Hat
Well, in our case, because I have two use cases, one is with the operator, which obviously is super easy with OpenShift because it's just click, click start aside from the issue from the operator. But that's a different interview. And the other point is for the web portal that our portal team uses, it's very easy. Two perform a task needed for them to do their deployment, their pipelines, and their daily Java.
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VMware by Broadcom
If you're looking for the industry standard in server virtualization, I would recommend ESXi. After decades of expertise in the field, VMware continues to provide a strong product, production-ready, with an easy-to-learn interface that allows for quick management along with less costly upfront onboarding and training. Grab the free personal-use license and install in your homelab to start!
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Pros
Red Hat
  • Scales very well.
  • It provides you with a landing pad to modernize what you have in a phased approach so you don't have to do it all at once, right? You can take small pieces of work and implement those on OpenShift over time. It enables us to be able to implement things like GI ops configuration as a service, and infrastructure as a service using the tools that are native to OpenShift, which gives us far greater reliability and consistency as far as monitoring for any kind of drift and configuration or unauthorized changes. So it pretty much gives us a lot of visibility on things that are otherwise relatively difficult to see using the old means of doing what we do. So it provides us with a modern set of tools to accomplish all those objectives.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • Resource management. The automatic load balancing works very well to ensure no host is taxed disproportionately compared to the others.
  • Templates and cloning. It is very easy to set up a template and spin up new servers based on a specific setup. This makes server management very streamlined.
  • VM management. The vSphere interface is very easy to use and navigate. Everything is responsive and it works when you need it to. The options are also robust while also being arranged in a straightforward manner.
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Cons
Red Hat
  • Network of observability, so having one single screen to see to have some network-related metrics for the pod levels. Also at the cluster itself level and more importantly is ease of use for troubleshooting when there's any timeout. This has been the single kind of issue I've been facing for my three years of experience with OpenShift and it hasn't been an easy task for such troubleshooting.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • VMware ESXi can improve on the UI that is installed on the bare metal machine. The menus can be hard to navigate when looking for simple configuration items.
  • VMware ESXi can improve on the stability of their overall hypervisor. There have been a few times we had to reinstall due to corruption of VMware ESXi.
  • I would like to see VMware ESXi do better at adding more standard free features in their consumer version of VMware ESXi. For example, having the ability to back up virtual machines is good practice and something that would be very nice if offered in their free version.
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Likelihood to Renew
Red Hat
Leverage OpenShift Online constantly at both the free and paid tiers. While AWS is convenient, it often brings more administration than I want to deal with for a quick application (i.e. Drupal or Wordpress blog). OpenShift also simplifies the DNS registration and ability to share application environments with team members
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VMware by Broadcom
It is critical to our business, what started out as a way to do certain functions, it has now become core to ensuring our product is available to our customers and reducing our costs to operate and reduce our recovery time and provisioning servers. Their support is great and the costs to renew is reasonable.
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Usability
Red Hat
As I said before, the obserability is one of the weakest point of OpenShift and that has a lot to do with usability. The Kibana console is not fully integrated with OpenShift console and you have to switch from tab to tab to use it. Same with Prometheus, Jaeger and Grafan, it's a "simple" integration but if you want to do complex queries or dashboards you have to go to the specific console
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VMware by Broadcom
The interface is fairly intuitive for most things, and the areas that are a little less obvious usually have fantastic documentation in the online knowledgebase. In 3-4 years of managing our ESXi hosts, I think that I have only opened 4-5 support cases for things that I could not figure out myself or find answers to on the website.
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Reliability and Availability
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
VMware by Broadcom
Without the need to patch the servers with bug fixes and enhancements we whave not experienced any downtime with VMware issues. Even the bug fixes and updates do not cause of downtime as we just migrate the servers to the opposite node and update the one and then move servers back. Very simple and painless.
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Performance
Red Hat
Applications deployed to OpenShift clusters stay responsive when peak load hits or when the traffic dies down - since the platform reacts by scaling out or scaling in the deployed applications elastically - achieved through' policy sense and response automation - leveraging monitoring, measuring (metrics), auto-scaling to meet SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs. This approach works for stateless or stateful business logic hosting applications. The deployed applications perform consistently, stably, and securely across many deployment platforms - public clouds, private data centers, at the edge, or on factory floors - hosted by bare metal or virtual environments.
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VMware by Broadcom
We do not notice any difference between a physical and virtual server running the same workload. In fact we can scale quicker with the virtual server than we can with the physical.
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Support Rating
Red Hat
Their customer support team is good and quick to respond. On a couple of occassions, they have helped us in solving some issues which we were finding a tad difficult to comprehend. On a rare occasion, the response was a bit slow but maybe it was because of the festival season. Overall a good experience on this front.
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VMware by Broadcom
I can't say enough good about VMware's support team. To an individual they take ownership of the case, provide thorough answers, and follow up regularly. On one occasion, a problem we experienced with NSX Endpoint was escalated to development for a permanent resolution after a workaround was found. In my experience, most companies would have tried to find a way to close a case like that instead of taking it all the way. Most importantly, when production is down and every second counts, they VMware teams understand that urgency and treat your issue as if it were the only one they had to deal with. You can't ask for better.
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Implementation Rating
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
VMware by Broadcom
Jsut read and follow anything your storage provider may require to allow the integration of VMware with storage operations, outside of that VMware jsut works.
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Alternatives Considered
Red Hat
We had some existing apps and were looking for a platform to modernize our app deployments and scale for future growth. Based on Kubernetes, OpenShift offers more flexibility and customization. We could deploy any type of containerized application, not just Cloud Foundry-specific ones. I particularly liked the built-in security and its focus on rapid and automated deployments. Moreover, our cloud strategy isn't set in stone. OpenShift's flexibility means we could deploy on-prem, in multiple public clouds, or use a hybrid approach - something other products couldn't offer as expected.
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VMware by Broadcom
As long as you're using Nutanix AOS on Nutanix hardware and are paying their software support fees, AOS is a valid competitor to VMware and can save money due to not needing a license and having their server management system built into the base host management system. If you aren't using Nutanix hardware, however, VMWare is in most cases the best way to go. I cannot comment on HyperV, but most IT people I know either use it because they have to (most) or they like it better (not many).
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Red Hat
It's easy to understand what are being billed and what's included in each type of subscription. Same with the support (Std or Premium) you know exactly what to expect when you need to use it. The "core" unit approach on the subscription made really simple to scale and carry the workloads from one site to another.
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VMware by Broadcom
it has been fair and easy to understand. I know VMware is looking at wanting to change from CPU to core pricing so we will see what that looks like when it happens.
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Scalability
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
VMware by Broadcom
We started out with a two-server cluster and adding a third or fourth is very straightforward and simple with no issues. You just need to be aware of the size of your Vcenter Server to handle the workload, but still the resources needed is very minimal
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Return on Investment
Red Hat
  • I'll say a lot of positive impact because when we started making this product aware to all the application domains in our business, they saw how easy to use. I mean we are giving a lot of control to the development team, how they can scale their application, how can they check the health of the application, and what action they can take if they are in any kind of failure or even meeting the business's SLA. So there are a lot of capabilities and those are really new features they can use. Those I think are a good use of OpenShift.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • VMWare ESXi licensing is affordable for our business - and the licensing model is simplistic. Not like that of Microsoft with having to keep track of server licenses and CAL licenses for users.
  • VMWare ESXi also has hardware-monitoring built-in, so that further saves us money from having to be spent with another vendor.
  • As much as I hate the saying "a single pane of glass" does fit for this product. You can manage your servers, monitor hardware status, create and export backup snapshots, manage virtual NICs, connect to various storage devices. We're very happy with this product.
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