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.
"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 most helpful aspect of KVM is the fact that the interface is so minimal. It includes just what you need to set up the VMs and manage them, and it's very simple to do so."
"This solution is open source and easy to configure."
"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."
"The initial setup was very easy."
"KVM is stable."
"The most valuable feature of KVM is its stability."
"I appreciate the network passcode feature in KVM, as it provides a convenient way to manage DNS and cloud hosting."
"The solution makes migration easy."
"There aren't any bugs on the solution."
"Customers are moving to open source and Red Hat is the leader in this particular space. I think customers feel more confident running Red Hat Virtualization than VMware."
"It's a scalable solution."
"The solution has a good licensing module."
"Technically, the main reason why I'm using Red Hat is because of its stability."
"The price is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's much cheaper than, for example, VMware."
"RHEV’s cost is much less compared to VMware."
"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."
"The networking with wireless devices needs improvement."
"The grid interface of KVM needs improvement. It could be more beautiful, especially when compared to VMware."
"Technical support is not top-notch."
"The speed is around thirty percent slower than another competitor. This would be something to work on."
"The KVM tech support is really bad. They are not very responsive."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved and made more user-friendly."
"The solution should be more user friendly. We are struggling with the command lines."
"We'd like it if it would be possible on Red Hat Virtualization to possibly connect two or three VMs to the same disk."
"The availability of technical expertise with the solution may be limited in some areas."
"RHEV can improve by keeping pace with new features and new enhancements. They should not be halted or delayed innovation because over the past quarter the enhancements have not been as fast as they have been previously."
"The UI should be more interactive with additional features."
"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."
"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 lags behind in that you need to go to something like Fedora to get all the extra bells and whistles."
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.
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.