Red Hat Virtualization (formerly Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, broadly known as RHEV) is an enterprise level server and desktop virtualization solution. Red Hat Virtualization also contains the functionality of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktop in later editions of the platform.
$999
Per Year Per Hypervisor
VMware ESXi
Score 7.7 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 Virtualization
VMware ESXi
Editions & Modules
Standard
$999.00
Per Year Per Hypervisor
Premium
$1,499.00
Per Year Per Hypervisor
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Red Hat Virtualization (RHV)
VMware ESXi
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Red Hat Virtualization
VMware ESXi
TrustRadius Insights
Red Hat Virtualization
VMware ESXi
Highlights
Research Team Insight
Published
Red Hat Virtualization and VMware ESXi are server virtualization solutions. VMware ESXi is a proprietary bare-metal hypervisor bundled with VMware’s vSphere product. Red Hat Virtualization is an open-source, Linux-based platform that includes hypervisors and a virtualization manager. Both products are most heavily used by mid-size and enterprise-level organizations, likely because both are primarily designed for and marketed to businesses with large-scale virtualization needs.
Features
Although both VMware ESXi and Red Hat Virtualization provide similar virtualized server benefits, they differ in their usage and structure.
The prevailing opinion of VMware ESXi is that it’s a straightforward, dependable hypervisor, with some users experiencing years of consistent server uptime even during hardware failures and other setbacks. It requires relatively few hardware resources, making a minimal impact on its host machine. Deploying new servers with VMware ESXi is quick and simple, even when you need to configure the server from scratch. When it’s time to upgrade hardware, VMware’s detailed hardware compatibility guidelines help IT departments make the right selection.
Red Hat Virtualization is designed for smooth implementation, even if you’re replacing an existing virtualization solution. Red Hat Virtualization offers pre-built scripts and professional assistance to help new customers have a smooth migration experience. Their professional customer support extends beyond migration, and many customers specifically report a good experience with Red Hat Virtualization’s support team. For an enterprise-level product, Red Hat Virtualization still has a relatively low price point compared to proprietary competitors like VMware. It’s also Linux-based and open-source, two appealing qualities for many IT professionals.
Limitations
Before you purchase either solution, though, it’s important to consider the drawbacks of each product. Neither Red Hat Virtualization or VMware ESXi are free from complaints.
VMware ESXi isn’t a complete solution on its own; it’s best used as the foundation of a full virtualization stack. Licensing for VMware ESXi and other supporting VMware products can get expensive fast, especially when you need higher subscription tiers for the features you want. Its web-based management client is a frequent pain point, with some users reporting that it’s not compatible with their browser. And while VMware’s hardware compatibility guidelines are comprehensive, that’s by necessity: VMware ESXi can be very picky about the hardware it will run on. If your existing hardware doesn’t fit the requirements, getting the compatible products could inflate your virtualization expenses.
Red Hat Virtualization offers a client-based UI as opposed to a browser-based interface, but many users complain that the UI is outdated and clunky to use. The migration scripts provided by the company might not be plug-and-play for all users, hanging up on unexpected problems such as unusual disk naming conventions. Red Hat Virtualization doesn’t offer live-patching options and requires a reboot to implement upgrades. The resulting downtime can be frustrating for IT administrators and end users alike.
Pricing
VMware ESXi is available as part of VMware’s vSphere product, which has a free vSphere Hypervisor edition limited to a single physical server. vSphere has multiple packages, tiers, and subscription levels with differing capabilities, ranging from $510 to over $20,000. For full pricing information, refer to the vSphere pricing page.
Pricing information for Red Hat Virtualization is available from Red Hat or a Red Hat sales partner.
Features
Red Hat Virtualization
VMware ESXi
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
Red Hat Virtualization is suitable for small implementation and hosting VMs. However, when you start asking for additional features or enhancements, the engineering team is not the flexible as other engineering teams in Red Hat. It is very likely they will not accept adding features or in the best case. They wouldn't commit to a plan when it is possible to be available.
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!
There are some odd issues with VMware's virtualized network drive (VMXNET3). On occasion, after a reboot of a Windows-based VM the NIC will fail to bind properly and network access is unavailable until an admin intervenes by disabling/re-enabling the adapter. While it's possible that our environment is a contributing factor, this never happens on VMs using Intel E1000 emulation, only the paravirtual NICs.
Logging is extensive but difficult to work with. VMware's solution is a product called Log Insight, which comes at additional cost. Fortunately this is somewhat mitigated by the extensive support documentation and robust user community, but in the heat of the moment obtaining the required detail can be a trying experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I rarely ever need support for anything VMWare makes, but when I do, the documentation available just in the free community is generally enough. It's extensive and the community is truly robust and active. And if you have a myvmware account, you can get support for your owned products from VMWare support by the conventional case/ticket method
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.
Red Hat Virtualization is the best enterprise-level virtualization software for an organization that needs cost-effective and flexible solutions for its environment. We can easily integrate RHEV with other Red Hat software like OpenStack...etc. RHEV is highly customizable software, which helps us to customize our environment. Since RHEV is an open-source tool, we can install it on any hardware. There is no proprietary dependency.
While Hyper-V also can work very well and can have licensing benefits, it does rely on Windows in order to run. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can add another layer of potential failure and might not be running on as low of a level as ESXi does. The footprint for Hyper-V can be smaller if the Desktop Experience isn't used for the hosts, but this is the default fashion that ESXi has been running for many years. VMware's support has always been stellar, and its documentation is phenomenal. Hyper-V can work as a virtual environment option, but ESXi has never let me down in any environment I have managed. I will continue standing by this product and prefer it over other options. It has proven itself time and time again over time as the defacto virtual environment hosting platform.
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
Positively, it has saved us time in spinning up new servers for the different departments in our company. It is easy for us to spin up virtual machines with VMware ESXi and deploy applications at the drop of a hat.
Positively we are able to save space in our data closets as we no longer need to keep room for physical servers and workstations, allowing us to expand in other areas like networking equipment and physical backup solutions.
It has moved our business forward as we are able to migrate old servers and static workstations in the virtual environment allowing us to easily keep an eye on older applications and update/backup easily through VMware ESXi management console.
