vSphere offers a maximum of 12TB of RAM per host with a maximum of 64 hosts per cluster. VMware offers a scalable virtualization platform, however it’s important to consider how adding additional hosts or VMs might impact an ELA. Maturityīoth KVM and ESXi are mature and stable hypervisors that can support enterprise workloads. Overall, KVM has a lower total cost of ownership. Although an ELA may save you budget up front, it can increase your costs over time with incremental gains in capacity and functionality in return. With VMware, you will need to purchase licenses for various products and will be locked into an enterprise license agreement (ELA). KVM is distributed as part of many open source operating systems, so there isn’t an additional cost. CostĬost is a key differentiator between KVM and the VMware virtualization solutions. You won’t have the same restrictions with KVM because it is open source and can be integrated with your existing infrastructure and with many different Linux and Windows platforms. This can also increase your hardware requirements. ESXi uses VMware’s management platform, which means you will need to use other products in VMware’s control stack. Hypervisors use different methods to communicate with the physical hardware of the host. In terms of speed, KVM runs applications at near-native speeds, faster than other industry hypervisors, according to the SPECvirt_sc2013 benchmark. ESXi also has slower performance when running servers, although this difference may be insignificant for typical loads. KVM and ESXi are both type 1 hypervisors, which means they should outperform a type 2 hypervisor.ĮSXi generally requires more time to create and start a server than KVM.

One of the most important areas to consider is how the hypervisor’s performance will impact your infrastructure.

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