We performed a comparison between Hyper-V and KVM based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below
Comparison Results: Hyper-V is the clear winner in this comparison it is easy to install, robust and high performing. Hyper-V, as a Microsoft product, also offers stable and ongoing customer support.
"It is a very stable product. We have not had any issues with Hyper-V crashing itself."
"The solution has good scalability."
"It is very easy to install. It can be done in a day."
"It allowed us to add on servers and fix things in an expedient manner."
"This solution helps us with production of our office business needs."
"It utilizes the hardware so there are multiple applications running on one hypervisor."
"This is the best solution for customers with budget constraints."
"It runs our most critical workloads and supports all our branch offices."
"Our production servers are running in Linux, and this solution supports that environment well."
"The initial setup was simple."
"It is an easily scalable solution."
"I think nine out of the ten supercomputers in the world use Linux KVM, so I think that attests to the fact that it is a scalable product."
"It offers a high-availability environment."
"There is a strong emphasis on availability, and they have numerous API interfaces for distributed storage and the solution is quite known for its openness."
"Good screen and keyboard sharing feature."
"The product is really good...One can get good performance because of kernel-based virtualization."
"Hyper-V serves its purpose, but some areas may not be as feature-rich as alternatives like VMware ESXi."
"If you have a bigger implementation, you need more tools to coexist with many, many features that are not present in the base Hyper-V."
"There are bugs, and this should be resolved by Microsoft."
"I also use VMware which I find to be more scalable and stable overall."
"There's room for improvement in Hyper-V. One area I've personally encountered issues with is live migration. Sometimes during live migrations, the process gets stuck in a certain state. This can happen with replication as well. It's not necessarily a major problem, but at times, the error messages aren't very informative. They don't clearly explain why the migration failed."
"An improvement I suggest is having more guest operating systems."
"One of the network problems I face is I cannot introduce other security layers on top of Hyper-V as you can in VMware. When it comes to the network the VMware is more flexible than Hyper-V."
"Disaster recovery capabilities are the primary choice for improvement."
"One problem I have is that it's not very scalable when it comes to resizing the VM disk dimensions. For example, if you have initially set a virtual drive to 10 GB and you want to upgrade it to 15 GB, it's not that easy."
"The virtual manager and the graphical QEMU for KVM need some improvement."
"I have previously used VMware and KVM is easier to use. However, they both have their strengths depending on their use cases. They are mostly equal. One of VMware's advantages is it has better support."
"Business continuity features need to be added."
"Technical support is not top-notch."
"KVM is very difficult to manage and run on daily operations."
"I believe KVM offers a unified answer, while ProxMark addresses orchestration. KVM lacks orchestration. If the aim is to centrally oversee multiple KVMs – let's say to freeze them – a centralized management solution is absent."
"I would like to see more focus on microservices and integration with Kubernetes or OpenShift."
Hyper-V is ranked 3rd in Server Virtualization Software with 134 reviews while KVM is ranked 4th in Server Virtualization Software with 39 reviews. Hyper-V is rated 8.0, while KVM is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Hyper-V writes "It's a low-cost solution that enabled us to shrink everything down into a single server ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of KVM writes "Delivers good performance because of kernel-based virtualization". Hyper-V is most compared with VMware vSphere, VMware Workstation, Proxmox VE, Oracle VM VirtualBox and Nutanix AHV Virtualization, whereas KVM is most compared with Proxmox VE, Oracle VM VirtualBox, VMware vSphere, VMware Workstation and Oracle VM. See our Hyper-V vs. KVM report.
See our list of best Server Virtualization Software vendors.
We monitor all Server Virtualization Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.