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.
"The installation was straightforward."
"The solution allows us to take advantage of our physical environment."
"Hyper-V deployment is very user-friendly. It supports partial scripting and offers a UI for a smooth experience. There's also PowerShell scripting available for advanced users."
"There are some products that you can mount over Hyper-V that provide the features that, in today's Hyper-V, are not present."
"The most valuable feature of Hyper-V is the replica service."
"This solution is much easier to manage than a bare metal machine. It is so easy to manage something through the virtual machine."
"I think all of these improvements are going in a good direction. For me, its direction is good and I'm very satisfied with this product."
"The solution is very powerful, easy to use, user-friendly, and integrates well with Windows. If you are looking for a hundred percent Microsoft environment it would be a good idea to go with Hyper-V. They work wonderfully together."
"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."
"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."
"It is an easily scalable solution."
"It offers a high-availability environment."
"What I like most about KVM is that it's very easy to use. Everything is built-in, even when writing command lines."
"The product is really good...One can get good performance because of kernel-based virtualization."
"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."
"If you prefer command-line, there are all kinds of command-line options."
"Hyper-V serves its purpose, but some areas may not be as feature-rich as alternatives like VMware ESXi."
"I encounter issues such as mouse cursor problems, dependencies, lagging, freezing, and unresponsiveness using Hyper-V."
"It needs additional administration and monitoring capabilities."
"The interface could be more user friendly. In addition, the documentation and security could use improvement."
"The product can be a bit difficult to use."
"There's room for improvement in Hyper-V. One area I've personally encountered issues with is live migration. Sometimes during live migrations, the process gets stuck in a certain state. This can happen with replication as well. It's not necessarily a major problem, but at times, the error messages aren't very informative. They don't clearly explain why the migration failed."
"The solution could improve by having virtual restore."
"The biggest problem with Hyper-V is that the virtual machines are mostly running on top of the Windows Server, so we often need to reboot the machine and virtual machines when updating the host level. That's why we prefer VMware. It's much easier to patch the host. Also, Hyper-V has security vulnerabilities. It's easy to attack and compromise the host."
"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."
"The virtual manager and the graphical QEMU for KVM need some improvement."
"The speed is around thirty percent slower than another competitor. This would be something to work on."
"We are not getting good support from KVM, and it is not that user-friendly."
"Support for VF is needed, where you can, for example, export from VMware to KVM."
"The product must provide better performance monitoring features."
"I have encountered difficulties in getting the tool's documentation."
"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."
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.