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.
"What I like most about KVM is that it's very easy to use. Everything is built-in, even when writing command lines."
"The KVM service is well managed with a central policy interface."
"The performance is great."
"The most valuable feature is hypervisor. I can host at the same time different operating systems in Linux Windows."
"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."
"This solution is open source and easy to configure."
"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."
"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."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is the popularity of the OS."
"Technically, the main reason why I'm using Red Hat is because of its stability."
"RHEV’s cost is much less compared to VMware."
"What they provide is way beyond the essential requirements of customers."
"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 this solution is the support portal."
"The solution makes migration easy."
"Monitoring and resolution could be improved."
"The KVM tech support is really bad. They are not very responsive."
"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."
"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."
"The product must provide better performance monitoring features."
"There are some issues with the graphics and some software that is very complex."
"The stability of this solution is less than other products in the same category."
"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."
"The solution should be made more user-friendly."
"There is not any proper documentation on the site to reference."
"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."
"Red Hat by itself is not scalable. But you can have third party add-ons like Ceph to make it massively scalable."
"The biggest improvement would be more third-party direct support for things like backups and provisioning through third-party portals."
"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."
"Configuring the network interfaces is much better in Ubuntu and should be improved."
"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."
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.