Red Hat Virtualization vs. VMware Workstation Player

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.

Incentivized

I think Vmware Workstation Player is great for test, dev environments allowing you to easily spin up virtual machines on a number of OSes. It is not as well suited for large enterprise environments as there are other more robust solutions from VMware that would work better. If you want to spend little or nothing this is your solution.

• RHV issues/bugs can be reported via Bugzilla to RH support. The service is great and typically responds soon.
• Red Hat distribution integration is seamless as it is integrated into the kernel.
• OpenStack support enables more customized VM templates and network configuration control.

Incentivized

• Create VM of Linux OSes on my WIndows machine.
• Create VM of Windows OSes on my Linux machine.
• Create VM of WIndows OSes on my MAC.

• Documentation of RHEV needs more improvement.
• RHEV GUI needs a lot of improvements in some versions of RHEV, GUI will not work properly (shows incorrect details of VM ).
• Need fast rollout of patch releases.
• Need good linux Knowledge to manage the RHEVM.

Incentivized

• Would be nice to use more VMs at once, but this is basically trial software, so it's hard to fault them.

Incentivized

I give a rating of 8 because VMware Player has its use cases, for example it requires the host OS to be logged in, and the VMware Player application to be opened and the Guest VM started. Only one VM can run at a time. I'd give a 9/10 to VMware Workstation because you can run shared VMs at startup without logging in or starting the workstation application. and i'd give ESX a 10/10 because ESX is the leader in enterprise visualization.

Incentivized

Great product. Its user-friendly GUI and overall performance are really the biggest strength of this tool. The reason why I don't give a higher note is because of the price. Although it's decent (starting at around $200 for a license), there is a good free alternative in VirtualBox. Not everyone values friendly GUI as something worth paying for. For people that are more tech-savvy, I would recommend looking into VirtualBox as they might actually like the model better (with downloadable add-ons and packages).

Incentivized

Integration isn't really relevant here but I see this question more as an OS compatibility for the VM. They state that they support over 200 different OS versions. I honestly have never tried anything else other than Ubuntu and Windows myself but nonetheless, this is impressive. I have not hit any limitation in my use of this software in terms of limitation or conflicts with other software.

Incentivized

VMware support is very knowledgeable on their products, eveything from AirWatch to ESX clusters. VMware is easy to contact, they stay in touch and see the issue through to the end and a final resolution. They keep you up to date on your issue status and don't leave you waiting for answers.

Incentivized

Installing the application was easily completed on the twenty computers that needed VMware Player. Once those 20 users were configured we copied our virtual machine template to the 20 users and turned on their newly provisioned virtual machines. We then configured unity mode so the user could easily work from within the virtual machine from their host desktop.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I haven't used VirtualBox a lot but I didn't find it as intuitive as VMware workstation. The later was much more simple for me to use. The Oracle tool is free however so it is definitely something to take into consideration. Also, VirtualBox needs you to get some additional packages depending on what you want to create/run as a VM. No big deal but you might be doing some tweaking before actually being ready to go as to with VMware, it's already part of it. Finally, and I'd rather mention that my memory is a bit fuzzy about that but, VirtualBox seemed a little less optimal when it comes to running VMs. If true, it might have been my type of usage. I did not have an extended experience with VirtualBox so you should definitely try it for yourself.

Incentivized

• It has had an extremely positive impact on my overall business and has allowed me to utilize and leverage it as an offering to my clients.
• It's an extremely solid, robust, and reliable product built off of KVM Virtualization technology.
• Less expensive solution than VMware and includes more features!

Incentivized

• For me the benefit was really high as I could use a solution that had a free educational version with VMware player. Without it, I would've needed to buy the SAS software itself which would have cost a few thousand dollars.
• Although I have no details about the ROI, I know that software testing teams that use the software are saving a lot of money buy using virtual machines. It is obviously a great saving both in physical machine count but also in workstation lab sizes.

Incentivized