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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)
4th
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 November 2026, in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) category, the mindshare of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops is 2.1%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Workstation is 9.1%, down from 14.2% 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 Desktops2.1%
Other88.8%
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."
"I appreciate the ease of backup and snapshot creation. The ability to revert to previous versions without losing data is very useful for our team."
"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."
"VMware Workstation’s most valuable features are backup and data transfer from one server to another."
"Great at solving connection problems."
"VMware Workstation is easy to manage and understand."
"Having ten people working off a single piece of hardware reduces costs."
"The most valuable features of VMware Workstation are the speed of access and quality of upgrade."
"VMware player is a very good alternative for those who want a stable and free virtualization platform that can be easily run in various Operating System platforms like Windows, Linux, Macintosh etc."
 

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."
"It would be great if VMware Workstation had more networking options and compatibility, that would be great. I would like to deploy virtual switches and play around with networking a bit more. Otherwise, I have to deploy ESXi Virtual Edition and emulate it, which is painful and clunky."
"VMware Workstations is for desktop use only and is pricey."
"I have had issues with the virtual network adapters in the past that has taken some time to troubleshoot."
"Its networking features need improvement."
"There could be more integration with different tools."
"It would be helpful if VMware Workstation included an in-built monitoring tool for monitoring things."
"The price should be reduced."
"The solution can be expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I use the free developer stuff right now."
"You need to pay for a license, but I don't think it costs that much. I think it's a one-time payment."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being expensive."
"The licensing costs are cheap. I pay approximately $100 per year."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The pricing is a bit steep in my opinion for testing and there are other options."
"The solution's pricing is almost the same as what Google Cloud, AWS, or Microsoft would charge you."
"With all its support and ease of use, VMware Player's pricing is fair."
"The solution is moderately priced. I rate the pricing a six out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Comms Service Provider
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
8%
Outsourcing 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.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.