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.
"It is easy to use, stable, and flexible. It is a pretty mature product, and it is faster than VirtualBox."
"What I like most about KVM is that it's very easy to use. Everything is built-in, even when writing command lines."
"The tool's most valuable feature is backup. The product makes it easy to manage virtual machines. Other tools require third-party applications like VMware and vSphere. However, KVM doesn't require these applications."
"Documentation and problem-solving troubleshooting are the most valuable features. Performance (when fine-tuned and with "special" HW) is awesome, equal to or more than other enterprise closed-source solutions."
"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."
"The initial setup was simple."
"The most valuable feature is hypervisor. I can host at the same time different operating systems in Linux Windows."
"I have found KVM to be scalable."
"The solution is stable."
"The initial setup is fairly straightforward and well-documented. The process is very similar to its competitors. The success of your setup depends on how well you plan."
"Technically, the main reason why I'm using Red Hat is because of its stability."
"RHEV’s cost is much less compared to VMware."
"It is very stable."
"There aren't any bugs on the solution."
"This solution is very stable. Much more so than similar products."
"We find the ease of use of this solution to be invaluable. It is user-friendly and integrates well with other software."
"The grid interface of KVM needs improvement. It could be more beautiful, especially when compared to VMware."
"The virtual manager and the graphical QEMU for KVM need some improvement."
"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."
"We would like to have a software lifecycle solution included in this solution. We can handle the software needed for KVM, but also the software that we provide. A lifecycle component would be very beneficial."
"Some things are pretty basic, and they could be more robust with more detail."
"The speed is around thirty percent slower than another competitor. This would be something to work on."
"The only negative aspect of needing hardware support is a fully functional KVM can be dropped. It would be nice if the support for other platforms, like ARM or Risk, were as good as the x86 one. However, with the democratization of Chromebooks based on these chips and mobile devices, it will not take long for that to happen."
"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."
"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."
"The UI should be more interactive with additional features."
"With RHEV, the cyberattacks should be fewer. I want RHEV to be better protected."
"Red Hat by itself is not scalable. But you can have third party add-ons like Ceph to make it massively scalable."
"When we do a direct comparison, then obviously VMware does better in terms of having Fault Tolerance and doing active disaster recovery and these kind of things. This is something that can be improved within Red Hat."
"It would be better to have more patches, especially kernel-level updates, live and online so that we can keep the business up and running during this period."
"The biggest improvement would be more third-party direct support for things like backups and provisioning through third-party portals."
"The solution has a very small lifecycle."
KVM is ranked 4th in Server Virtualization Software with 39 reviews while RHEV is ranked 10th in Server Virtualization Software with 32 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 "Offers frameworks with well-documented API and easy to use". 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.