We performed a comparison between KVM and RHEV based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: KVM wins out in this comparison. Users find it very fast and super easy to use and manage. It provides excellent security and scales easily. Many users feel RHEV is lacking in some documentation capabilities and security features and that it can be challenging to scale up when needed.
"If you are a Linux desktop user, KVM is the solution to go with if you have to start virtual machines with Linux or other operating systems with almost zero extra configuration needed."
"KVM is stable."
"Scaling the solution is easy. You just have to add more hardware."
"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."
"I like that it's easy to manage. It's also more powerful when it comes to security than others. That point of view is the one consideration. The other consideration is that it's cost-effective."
"The most valuable feature of KVM is its stability."
"Our production servers are running in Linux, and this solution supports that environment well."
"It offers a high-availability environment."
"The most valuable features of RHEV are all the tools, such as virtualization, management of cloud platforms, and integration of container environments. The solution has good compatibility between virtualization, content management, and cloud management. Having the full set of these tools is the advantage of it."
"The most valuable feature of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is its pricing."
"The solution is stable."
"The solution has a good licensing module."
"The solution makes migration easy."
"There aren't any bugs on the solution."
"The solution is overall very good with all the facilities. It is user friendly, easy to configure, has documentation, and support is available."
"Technically, the main reason why I'm using Red Hat is because of its stability."
"KVM is very difficult to manage and run on daily operations."
"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."
"The main drawback in the solution is probably disaster recovery."
"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 initial setup of this solution is more difficult than some of the competing products and it could be improved."
"I have encountered difficulties in getting the tool's documentation."
"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."
"Red Hat by itself is not scalable. But you can have third party add-ons like Ceph to make it massively scalable."
"The availability of technical expertise with the solution may be limited in some areas."
"The UI should be more interactive with additional features."
"It lags behind in that you need to go to something like Fedora to get all the extra bells and whistles."
"The solution could use network virtualization."
"We hope that Red Hat can produce a paradigm edition. We are looking for paradigm computing and paradigm storage. Its scalability can be improved. It is not easy to scale, and we hope that Red Hat can provide a more scalable system. They should also provide local service and support. Our customers are looking for a good software vendor to provide professional services."
"Customers are not aware of this solution, they can improve by providing more awareness and solution availability."
"The support is tricky in a few places. We're facing some challenges within Malaysia where we don't really have the system integrators available who can provide extended support. When we need personnel on-site, we can't get them."
KVM is ranked 4th in Server Virtualization Software with 38 reviews while RHEV is ranked 10th in Server Virtualization Software with 31 reviews. KVM is rated 8.0, while RHEV is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of KVM writes "Delivers good performance because of kernel-based virtualization". On the other hand, the top reviewer of RHEV writes "The solution is scalable and affordable, but it lacks features, and it is not easy to manage". KVM is most compared with Proxmox VE, Oracle VM VirtualBox, Hyper-V, VMware vSphere and Citrix Hypervisor, whereas RHEV is most compared with VMware vSphere, Proxmox VE, Hyper-V, Oracle VM and Nutanix AHV Virtualization. See our KVM vs. RHEV report.
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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.