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.
"The initial setup was simple."
"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."
"One of the best features of KVM is its user-friendly interface."
"Scaling the solution is easy. You just have to add more hardware."
"The performance is great."
"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."
"KVM has a rich options set which can be directly used or via wrappers, such as libvirt."
"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."
"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 solution is a great all-round product. The virtualization is especially good."
"Technically, the main reason why I'm using Red Hat is because of its stability."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Red Hat is the most stable system."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support portal."
"There aren't any bugs on the solution."
"The solution is stable."
"Support for VF is needed, where you can, for example, export from VMware to KVM."
"In KVM, snapshots and cloning are areas where there could be a little more sophistication, like VMware."
"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."
"Monitoring and resolution could be improved."
"Technical support is not top-notch."
"Lacks high availability across clusters as well as support for Apache CloudStack."
"The stability of this solution is less than other products in the same category."
"The main drawback in the solution is probably disaster recovery."
"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 solution could use network virtualization."
"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."
"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."
"There is not any proper documentation on the site to reference."
"A few features of the product do not work as well as those in VMware."
"Configuring the network interfaces is much better in Ubuntu and should be improved."
"With RHEV, the cyberattacks should be fewer. I want RHEV to be better protected."
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.