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Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops vs VMware Workstation comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Red Hat Enterprise Virtuali...
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
18th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
2.4
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Workstation
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) category, the mindshare of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops is 2.0%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Workstation is 9.1%, down from 14.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Workstation9.1%
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops2.0%
Other88.9%
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
 

Featured Reviews

RobertThompson 1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Security Manager at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Free version available but hard to understand
Personally, I don't think it has any commendable features. The biggest thing about it is that, compared to what you can do with VMware and Horizon, it just seems like there's an awful lot of extra work involved with the Red Hat virtualization. It doesn't just work out of the box. You have to read through about six different documents, and everybody's experience is different. So it's kind of annoying. That would be the main thing. If you're not a Linux geek, it's very hard to understand. And it's probably because I came out of the Windows world. I learned this as part of my cross-training, but I just found the way that it happens with VMware and all that stuff to be easier to use.
GC
Director of IT at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Creating and destroying test machines has simplified our operations and reduced manual recovery time
The Snapshot feature has helped with workflows by allowing us to more easily reconstruct something if we lose it or need it. We've been making Snapshots on a consistent basis, mainly of servers. The VX Rail has worked effectively because we can create machines as we need them. It's helpful for resetting and has helped with our operations because I had set up failover servers on Vertex, but we don't have to do that anymore since VMware will just create a new machine immediately if we have a problem. We're doing our domain servers on there, and we've been very happy with that. We appreciate that we can create machines simply to test things out and then destroy them. I use it for a test machine for checking emails, so if the email has a virus in it, we can just destroy the machine and create a new one. We're slowly moving into the VMware environment, although the pricing with Broadcom has been a disaster.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The improvement to our organization is managing all our KVM-based virtual machines in a management environment."
"The most valuable features are automated deployment and transparent movement for virtual machines over all our locations."
"There's lots of good support out there in the community."
"VMware Player helps you to virtualize and install Ubuntu or any other operating system, even on a Windows laptop."
"We can undo some changes using the snapshot feature."
"The product is stable, very easy to deploy, easy to use, easy to configure, and easy to set up."
"Overall, this is a good product and I recommend it."
"The most valuable features of VMware Workstation are the speed of access and quality of upgrade. Those are the more important and pertinent aspects as far as we were concerned. Functionality and features were relevant for the customers. What a customer chose, we had to make sure that it operated."
"I have found this product excellent for test/dev environments. This is 90% of what I use this product for."
"The initial setup is simple and takes only five minutes to complete."
"It has given us the flexibility to recreate live server scenarios including the supporting networks and AD domain controllers; these are then used to test upgrades or migrations with no impact on the live servers or network."
 

Cons

"The best improvement for oVirt 4.2 is to enable backup features for major backup products of virtual machines."
"The biggest thing about it is that, compared to what you can do with VMware and Horizon, it just seems like there's an awful lot of extra work involved with Red Hat virtualization."
"In v6, it was a 32bit environment with a maximum memory of 4Gb RAM. Therefore, this required a high level of swap out of RAM to disk in order to provide sufficient memory space to run VMs, this occasionally caused system crashes."
"Eventually, we had to get some licenses with Broadcom, and all the costs went up dramatically to the point where if I had it to do over again, I might have made a different decision."
"I have had issues with the virtual network adapters in the past that has taken some time to troubleshoot."
"The product's integration capabilities are an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"To avoid problems you really do need to be on the most recent version, especially if you want to use W10 images."
"VMware Workstation has a high price than competitors in the market."
"The network configuration was not as easy as it could be and could take less time. We faced challenges with backup due to limitations in the free version, requiring us to switch to a paid version."
"The price should be reduced."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I use the free developer stuff right now."
"VMware Workstation is an expensive solution in Asian countries."
"With all its support and ease of use, VMware Player's pricing is fair."
"It is an expensive solution."
"VMware Workstation's costs are lifetime."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being expensive."
"The solution's pricing is almost the same as what Google Cloud, AWS, or Microsoft would charge you."
"The product has a moderate price."
"With a VDI solution, there is always extra cost running a VDI solution but it's not for cost purposes anymore. In the beginning, it was to save money on hardware but at the moment it's other aspects that are more important why you should use a VDI solution."
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913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Comms Service Provider
12%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise18
 

Questions from the Community

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Which VMware solution would you go with - Workstation or vSphere?
VM Workstation’s setup is so easy, you can use it almost instantly, it works well with Windows and Linux. We like VM Workstation primarily to test environments to determine how well a solution will...
What needs improvement with VMware Player?
Here's what happened with us regarding the prices for VMware Workstation: we purchased everything through Dell, and as is common, we got busy and didn't get everything activated. By the time we tri...
What is your primary use case for VMware Player?
I have a bunch of VMware servers set up, including our domain servers, our data servers, and some test machines on VMware. We're not really using VMware Workstation as workstations. We've got a cou...
 

Also Known As

Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Casio, Telef‹nica, British Airways
Akademiska Hus
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops vs. VMware Workstation and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.