Red Hat OpenShift vs. VMware vSphere

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 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 vSphere
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
An enterprise workload platform, vSphere is used to improve the performance for a data center. It is used to boost operational efficiency, supercharge workload performance, and accelerate innovation.
$995
per year
Pricing
Red Hat OpenShiftVMware vSphere
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Standard
$995.00
per year
Enterprise
$3,995.00
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Red Hat OpenShiftVMware vSphere
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Red Hat OpenShiftVMware vSphere
Considered Both Products
Red Hat OpenShift
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
HPE Ezmeral has been a complete disaster in our experience, especially when compared to Red Hat OpenShift. The platform feels clunky and unfinished, with poor integration across components and a clear lack of maturity that results in frequent instability and unpredictable …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Open Source and i like Red Hat before VMware
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Cloud Foundry is open-source PaaS, started by VMware and spun out with other VMware-owned open-source code into EMC and VMware's Pivotal Software subsidiary. The Cloud Controller component is responsible for all management tasks. Being the main end point for the Cloud Foundry …
VMware vSphere

No answer on this topic

Features
Red Hat OpenShiftVMware vSphere
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Red Hat OpenShift
8.1
277 Ratings
3% above category average
VMware vSphere
-
Ratings
Ease of building user interfaces8.2239 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability9.0265 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform management overhead7.7247 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability7.8225 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control8.3249 Ratings00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration8.2234 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment creation8.4242 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment replication8.4229 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification7.8242 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue recovery7.5239 Ratings00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes8.3242 Ratings00 Ratings
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
Red Hat OpenShift
-
Ratings
VMware vSphere
7.3
67 Ratings
10% below category average
Virtual machine automated provisioning00 Ratings7.262 Ratings
Management console00 Ratings7.167 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup00 Ratings6.260 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration00 Ratings8.165 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security00 Ratings8.062 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Red Hat OpenShiftVMware vSphere
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.5 out of 10
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 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 vSphere
Likelihood to Recommend
9.2
(286 ratings)
7.2
(70 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.9
(25 ratings)
7.0
(7 ratings)
Usability
8.4
(11 ratings)
8.0
(11 ratings)
Availability
5.5
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.7
(131 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
6.6
(9 ratings)
8.0
(25 ratings)
In-Person Training
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.1
(3 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
8.0
(3 ratings)
8.4
(5 ratings)
Professional Services
7.3
(1 ratings)
9.7
(3 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Red Hat OpenShiftVMware vSphere
Likelihood to Recommend
Red Hat
Red Hat OpenShift, despite its complexity and overhead, remains the most complete and enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform available. It excels in research projects like ours, where we need robust CI/CD, GPU scheduling, and tight integration with tools like Jupyter, OpenDataHub, and Quiskit. Its security, scalability, and operator ecosystem make it ideal for experimental and production-grade AI workloads. However, for simpler general hosting tasks—such as serving static websites or lightweight backend services—we find traditional VMs, Docker, or LXD more practical and resource-efficient. Red Hat OpenShift shines in complex, container-native workflows, but can be overkill for basic infrastructure needs.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
vSphere is well suited for multiple VMWare hosts and can be very useful in larger enterprises where vMotion is used to load balance and failover running virtual machines. In smaller businesses with one or two hosts then the features can be overkill. The addition of virtual TPM support is a very nice addition to provide vm security in a more Microsoft supported methodology.
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Pros
Red Hat
  • We had a few microservices that dealt with notifications and alerts. We used OpenShift to deploy these microservices, which handle and deliver notifications using publish-subscribe models.
  • We had to expose an API to consumers via MTLS, which was implemented using Server secret integration in OpenShift. We were then able to deploy the APIs on OpenShift with API security.
  • We integrated Splunk with OpenShift to view the logs of our applications and gain real-time insights into usage, as well as provide high availability.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • vMotion that provides seamless movement of Virtual Machines between physical hosts and datastores.
  • Ease of Manage: vCenter provides very good management experience to the users.
  • It provides hassle free upgrade of versions, which requires good planning.
  • Easy to manage datastore, networks, CPU and memory resources.
  • It also allows to convert the physical machine and bring it to vSphere Environment with minimum effort.
Read full review
Cons
Red Hat
  • OpenShift virtualization has a little room for improvement. I'm coming from it as a Rev customer. There's some things in that OpenShift virtualization that were in Rev that I would like to see in OpenShift virtualization. I realized that they're chasing the VMware crowd and that's fine, but from us old Rev customers, we'd like to see some things that was in Rev around via migration and things of that nature that could be in OpenShift virtualization, I hope is being planned to be put in.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
  • Allow enable EVC without requiring host shutdown
  • More detail in recent tasks. Instead of just showing a task called "Reconfigure virtual machine" also have a link to more detailed information as to what was reconfigured, changed or removed.
  • Allow searching tasks or events
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Likelihood to Renew
Red Hat
OpenShift is really easy of use through its management console. OpenShift gives a very large flexibility through many inbuilt functionalities, all gathered in the same place (it's a very convenient tool to learn DevOps technics hands on) OpenShift is an ideal integrated development / deployment platform for containers
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VMware by Broadcom
We are constantly looking for change that will benefit our company. We are not ones to stick with a product simply because it is what we know, but rather looking for what fits us best. We can't imagine another product on the market today doing a better job of handling our infrastructure than vSphere.
Read full review
Usability
Red Hat
The virtualization part takes some getting used to it you are coming from a more traditional hypervisor. Customization options are not intuitive to these users. The process should be more clear. Perhaps a guide to Openshift Virtualization for users of RHV, VMware, etc. would ease this transition into the new platform
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VMware by Broadcom
Very useful for environments where space and energy consumption are issues and management is not very keen on upfront spending on hardware every time whenever requirement comes from any dept for provisioning a machine for their occasional use, easily can be done in case of VMware vSphere in few clicks. Backup, security, monitoring and management everything is covered but at additional cost.
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Reliability and Availability
Red Hat
Redhat openshift is generally reliable and available platform, it ensures high availability for most the situations. in fact the product where we put openshift in a box, we ensure that the availability is also happening at node and network level and also at storage level, so some of the factors that are outside of Openshift realm are also working in HA manner.
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VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Performance
Red Hat
Overall, this platform is beneficial. The only downsides we have encountered have been with pods that occasionally hang. This results in resources being dedicated to dead or zombie pods. Over time, these wasted resources occasionally cause us issues, and we have had difficulty monitoring these pods. However, this issue does not overshadow the benefits we get from Openshift.
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VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Red Hat
Every time we need to get support all the Red Hat team move forward looking to solve the problem. Sometimes this was not easy and requires the scalation to product team, and we always get a response. Most of the minor issues were solved with the information from access.redhat.com
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VMware by Broadcom
I rarely ever have to contact support and when I do need to resolve an issue, there is always an abundance of kb articles and research information available that can help quickly resolve the issue. Depending on the type of support contract you have, you may get support from some offshore group in another country and this could be a little challenging because of the language barrier.
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In-Person Training
Red Hat
I was not involved in the in person training, so i
can not answer this question, but the team in my org worked directly
with Openshift and able to get the in person training done easily, i did not
hear problem or complain in this space, so i hope things happen
seamlessly without any issue.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Red Hat
We went thru the training material on RH webesite, i think its very descriptive and the handson lab sesssions are very useful. It would be good to create more short duration videos covering one single aspect of openshift, this wll keep the interest and also it breaks down the complexity to reasonable chunks.
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VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Red Hat
The learning curve is quite high but worth it.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
Just make sure that when you implement, that the person implementing truly knows what they are doing and has a plan of action coming in. Since our initial implementation using a consulting service, I have implemented a few vSphere just from what I learned at the initial implementation and use over time, and the person implementing really needs to know what they are doing or you will miss out on features that may help you down the line
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Red Hat
The Tanzu Platform seemed overly complicated, and the frequent changes to the portfolio as well as the messaging made us uneasy. We also decided it would not be wise to tie our application platform to a specific infrastructure provider, as Tanzu cannot be deployed on anything other than vSphere. SUSE Rancher seemed good overall, but ultimately felt closer to a DIY approach versus the comprehensive package that Red Hat OpenShift provides.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
vSphere has a lot more feature sets than Hyper-V but at a much higher cost of entry versus MS Hyper-V. I have not been able to play with Hyper-V as much as I would have liked, but the setup and ongoing maintenance seems to be easier in vSphere than with Hyper-V
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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
The contract terms are very clear and can be updated as per the project requirement. Customer support is also included in the contract which help us to troubleshoot critical issues very easily. Training included in contract will really help the client team to empower and hands-on on the latest updates and enhancements
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Scalability
Red Hat
This is a great platform to deployment container applications designed for multiple use cases. Its reasonably scalable platform, that can host multiple instances of applications, which can seamlessly handle the node and pod failure, if they are configured properly. There should be some scalability best practices guide would be very useful
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VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
VMware by Broadcom
As I said earlier, they're always ready to understand our issues and propose the best and most appropriate solution for issues all the time. The security patches solution is accordingly to the business needs. Another scenario is their Knowledge Base where
they're many articles that help you in order to solve something which
is wrong.
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Return on Investment
Red Hat
  • All of the above. Red Hat OpenShift going into a developer-type setting can be stood up very quickly. There's a very short period to have developers onboard to it and they're able to become productive much faster than a grow your own type solution.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • Having vSphere helped my business quickly recover from a ransomware attack which would have crippled us for weeks if we were not virtualized. I think the ROI on something like that is immeasurable.
  • vSphere has allowed my company to purchase bigger server hardware to host 3 or 4 virtual servers, which was at a cost much lower than buying 3 or 4 server hardware boxes, saving us thousands each time we need to upgrade hardware.
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ScreenShots