

Oracle VM and VMware vSphere are key competitors in the virtualization market. VMware vSphere offers more advanced features, making it the preferable choice for environments seeking comprehensive virtualization, whereas Oracle VM provides a cost-effective solution suited for Oracle environments.
Features: Oracle VM provides hard partitioning, a wide range of operating system support, and is open-source, which brings cost savings and flexibility, particularly advantageous in Oracle-centric infrastructures. VMware vSphere offers advanced features like Distributed Resource Scheduler, vMotion, and HA, ensuring efficient resource management and workload mobility across hosts with no downtime.
Room for Improvement: Oracle VM lacks intuitive management interfaces, comprehensive backup solutions, and advanced automation capabilities, which can hinder broader adoption. VMware vSphere's cost and licensing model can be improved by simplifying pricing structures and offering more competitive rates for improved market adoption and customer satisfaction.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Oracle VM is typically easy to deploy within Oracle-centric setups, but support is inconsistent when dealing with broader environments. VMware vSphere deployment is straightforward for those familiar with VMware's ecosystem, though the licensing complexity and associated costs can impact customer satisfaction, despite its available technical support.
Pricing and ROI: Oracle VM is free to use with no licensing fees on Oracle hardware, making it an attractive option for Oracle products due to significant cost savings. VMware vSphere, while offering a robust feature set, justifies its higher cost through long-term reliability and comprehensive features, which attract businesses willing to invest for industry-leading stability.
We can say 10% is the approximate amount of savings because most of the things are automated and streamlined, so the manual work is eliminated in most cases.
The response time and quality of support could be improved.
Priority one issues are usually addressed by engineers within one to two hours.
Recently, support has been less friendly and slower, especially after the company was acquired by Broadcom.
If we have issues, the support tends to be unreliable
Scaling is easy, whether it is hyperconverged or a three-tier architecture.
VMware vSphere is highly scalable in terms of the number of users and the number of servers it can handle.
It is a highly scalable solution.
Not every upgrade goes smoothly, and after an upgrade, it sometimes stops working.
It is a very stable hypervisor solution.
While they are generally stable, if outages occur, they tend to be due to brands like HP or Dell, not VMware vSphere itself.
Mostly we don't have issues, but sometimes we have faced some stability issues because of some bugs and some CPU compatibility issues with Intel CPUs.
If I have limited systems and there is maintenance on the hardware, the Oracle systems are impacted.
Not every upgrade goes smoothly, and after an upgrade, it sometimes stops working.
Oracle VM provides automation capabilities in the new version.
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.
Oracle VM is not a very expensive solution.
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.
The solution is too expensive.
If there is an issue with the operating system running on top of it, there's no primary and secondary domain, rather segregated I/Os, disks, memory, everything assigned to a logical domain.
It is easy to copy or clone one Oracle workstation to another.
Oracle VM's features perform better on Windows compared to iOS.
The vMotion feature is beneficial for online migration of virtual machines from one host to another without downtime.
The tool is highly available, which is crucial for implementing critical applications requiring 24/7 availability.
I always use VMware vSphere vMotion; we work with this feature all the time. vMotion is very useful; that's why we use the virtualization.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| VMware vSphere | 18.9% |
| Oracle VM | 5.7% |
| Other | 75.4% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 36 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 19 |
| Large Enterprise | 38 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 175 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 137 |
| Large Enterprise | 259 |
Oracle VM for x86
Oracle VM for x86 is a Xen based server virtualization platform for public and private cloud and traditional on premise deployment. Oracle VM offers full lifecycle and application deployment from disk to cloud.
Designed and optimized for security, efficiency and performance Oracle VM supports major hardware vendors x86 and storage platforms and can run workloads on Linux, Windows and Oracle Solaris. Uniquely for our virtualization platform it offers live patching via Ksplice enhancing security and minimizing service disruption. Oracle VM supports hard partitioning which can significantly reduce software applications licensing costs.
Oracle VM for SPARC
Oracle VM for SPARC is a firmware based virtualization platform for Oracle and Fujitsu SPARC based servers running Solaris. Oracle VM supports hard partitioning which can significantly reduce software applications licensing costs.
VMware vSphere offers robust virtualization capabilities with features that enhance data center performance and optimize workloads. Centralized management and ease of deployment make it a cost-effective choice for many industries.
VMware vSphere is recognized for its high availability, vMotion, and Distributed Resource Scheduler, essential for efficient server infrastructure management. Users value its virtual machine management, seamless live migration, and strong resource allocation across data centers. Though the web client can be slow, and individual management of multiple ESXi hosts is challenging without central management, vSphere remains popular due to its flexibility and integration capabilities. While fault tolerance and free version features have their limitations, the product supports private clouds and hybrid cloud deployments effectively.
What are the key features of VMware vSphere?VMware vSphere is widely used in industries to manage server infrastructure effectively, hosting mission-critical applications like ERP and SQL servers. It supports development, testing, and backup environments, contributing to data center consolidation and cost reduction while enabling private and hybrid cloud setups.
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