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 have found KVM to be scalable."
"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 valuable feature is hypervisor. I can host at the same time different operating systems in Linux Windows."
"It offers a high-availability environment."
"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."
"Our production servers are running in Linux, and this solution supports that environment well."
"KVM has a rich options set which can be directly used or via wrappers, such as libvirt."
"The performance is great."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is the popularity of the OS."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support portal."
"Stability and speed are the most valuable aspects."
"RHEV’s cost is much less compared to VMware."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The price is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's much cheaper than, for example, VMware."
"The networking with wireless devices needs improvement."
"We are not getting good support from KVM, and it is not that user-friendly."
"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."
"There are some issues with the graphics and some software that is very complex."
"The solution should be more user friendly. We are struggling with the command lines."
"The main drawback in the solution is probably disaster recovery."
"KVM is very difficult to manage and run on daily operations."
"Technical support is not top-notch."
"A few features of the product do not work as well as those in VMware."
"The solution has a very small lifecycle."
"This solution could be more secure."
"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."
"The availability of technical expertise with the solution may be limited in some areas."
"Red Hat by itself is not scalable. But you can have third party add-ons like Ceph to make it massively scalable."
"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."
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.