We performed a comparison between Hyper-V and KVM based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below
Comparison Results: Hyper-V is the clear winner in this comparison it is easy to install, robust and high performing. Hyper-V, as a Microsoft product, also offers stable and ongoing customer support.
"I like that it's easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of Hyper-V is that it's very intuitive."
"Hyper-V improved the infrastructure drastically, not only from a performance perspective but from a control/administration view as well."
"The product is easy to manage. It improves our VM management."
"The simplicity and intuitiveness of the platform. It was a very simple adaptation, if you have any experience in virtualization."
"Hyper-V's technical support is good - they're responsive and sort cases based on criticality and category, so they get dealt with quickly and by the correct team."
"It is a very stable product. We have not had any issues with Hyper-V crashing itself."
"The flexibility and API are the most valuable features. It helps us be able to integrate with other systems and then push data easily."
"The initial setup was very easy."
"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."
"It is an open ecosystem, and we see there is a benefit in open-source solutions."
"KVM has a rich options set which can be directly used or via wrappers, such as libvirt."
"A very reliable solution which can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with reasonable overhead."
"What I like most about KVM is that it's very easy to use. Everything is built-in, even when writing command lines."
"It offers a high-availability environment."
"I think nine out of the ten supercomputers in the world use Linux KVM, so I think that attests to the fact that it is a scalable product."
"It needs to improve compatibility with third party software."
"There are some storage problems which do occur in high load systems, especially SQL workloads."
"An improvement I suggest is having more guest operating systems."
"We'd like a template feature to help deploy VMs quickly."
"I would like Microsoft to put more effort into the Admin Center interface and make it much easier. It is customizable, but you have to be a PowerShell expert to customize these things. That is a limitation."
"It's not completely stable because your stack becomes bloated."
"The pricing and technical support can be improved."
"In my opinion, it would have been better to truncate the site-to-site replication."
"We are not getting good support from KVM, and it is not that user-friendly."
"Lacks high availability across clusters as well as support for Apache CloudStack."
"The KVM tech support is really bad. They are not very responsive."
"The virtual manager and the graphical QEMU for KVM need some improvement."
"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."
"One thing that maybe could be improved is making it easier to scale. It needs to be more clear on how to scale the storage space for virtual machines."
"Business continuity features need to be added."
"In KVM, snapshots and cloning are areas where there could be a little more sophistication, like VMware."
Hyper-V is ranked 3rd in Server Virtualization Software with 134 reviews while KVM is ranked 4th in Server Virtualization Software with 39 reviews. Hyper-V is rated 8.0, while KVM is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Hyper-V writes "It's a low-cost solution that enabled us to shrink everything down into a single server ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of KVM writes "Delivers good performance because of kernel-based virtualization". Hyper-V is most compared with VMware vSphere, VMware Workstation, Proxmox VE, Oracle VM VirtualBox and Nutanix AHV Virtualization, whereas KVM is most compared with Proxmox VE, Oracle VM VirtualBox, VMware vSphere, VMware Workstation and Oracle VM. See our Hyper-V vs. KVM 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.