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.
"The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy to install."
"The product is easy to manage. It improves our VM management."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from how my company uses Hyper-V for replication."
"The solution has an easy setup."
"The most valuable feature is the high availability of the solution."
"I value the simplicity of configuration because it has worked as expected for my client."
"The interface is quite good."
"I like that Hyper-V is like a virtual environment. I like to use VMware because of the resource requirements. In Sri Lanka, most of the customers use the Hyper-V GUI. When installing the interface with the Windows version, we also install the Hyper-V feature on the server. This is because they require more features and memory. There are so many features that they have embedded in Hyper-V that are useful."
"I find the density of the product most valuable. It is density that a technologist can just assign page merging. This is what makes KVM one of the important players of the virtualization market."
"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."
"The product is really good...One can get good performance because of kernel-based virtualization."
"I have found KVM to be scalable."
"This solution is open source and easy to configure."
"It is an easily scalable solution."
"It is an open ecosystem, and we see there is a benefit in open-source solutions."
"The initial setup was very easy."
"They could work on lowering the cost of the solution."
"The initial setup was complex. It was nearly six years ago, but I remember it was complicated."
"The the only challenge for us was moving existing physical machines to virtual machines."
"The biggest problem with Hyper-V is that the virtual machines are mostly running on top of the Windows Server, so we often need to reboot the machine and virtual machines when updating the host level. That's why we prefer VMware. It's much easier to patch the host. Also, Hyper-V has security vulnerabilities. It's easy to attack and compromise the host."
"Status and availability became an issue and need."
"They can hot add NICs to the VMs. However, there is still not the ability to hot add virtual processors to running VMs."
"Hyper-V could improve the management tools."
"The weakness of Hyper-V is in its interaction with iSCSI protocols."
"The initial setup of this solution is more difficult than some of the competing products and it could be improved."
"We are not getting good support from KVM, and it is not that user-friendly."
"The solution should be more user friendly. We are struggling with the command lines."
"In our setup, we do not have any dashboards or orchestration, and it is hard to manage. We have 25 gig network cards, but the software driver we have only supported 10 gigs."
"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."
"The stability of this solution is less than other products in the same category."
"Business continuity features need to be added."
"Technical support could be better. In the next release, I would like to see an improved user interface and dashboard. This type of improvement will make it easy or help our engineers understand the solution from a requirement point of view."
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.