No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Hyper-V vs RHEV comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 6, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Hyper-V
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
145
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
RHEV
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
11th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Server Virtualization Software category, the mindshare of Hyper-V is 19.4%, up from 14.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of RHEV is 2.4%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Virtualization Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Hyper-V19.4%
RHEV2.4%
Other78.2%
Server Virtualization Software
 

Featured Reviews

Tomas Basus - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Professional at NIPOS
Virtualization has reduced licensing costs and improved integration but still needs better performance insight
Integrations bring the biggest benefit to us. We use half of our virtual machines that are Microsoft, so it works better hosted in Hyper-V compared to VMware. Clustering and failover capabilities in the product help with our availability. It helped because we switched to Hyper-V because it was lower cost than paying for high availability in VMware. We need Microsoft licenses for virtual machines, so it costs less than buying two solutions for that. We have data center editions, so it did not cost us additional money compared to paying for high availability from VMware. I think it helped a little, but not so different compared to VMware regarding security and bandwidth optimization.
Mike Neuliep - PeerSpot reviewer
Linux Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Has supported virtualization projects in side jobs but has required workarounds due to lack of maintenance
In my opinion, the best features of RHEV are that it is a real hypervisor and it is free, so it performs better than VMware. I have used the live migration feature in the past with RHEV. There is a free clone of it that is based on the open source. Live migration is a nifty feature if your app is not highly available and you need to do maintenance on a machine. You can migrate the VM off of it, do your maintenance, and move it back when you are done. RHEV has a high availability architecture with a built-in monitoring feature where you could see machines other than the one you are operating on. I tend to implement high availability not so much in RHEV, but by using standard application high availability strategies. Red Hat has another product specifically for high availability.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is actually very low on resources. It doesn't use many resources. It is also very easy to tailor. You can change things like the amount of memory and storage on the fly. It is very stable and reliable. I like its replication feature, which is very good. It is also very easy to move the virtual machines across push servers without any difficulty. Its performance is also very good. Now with this pandemic, a lot of workers are working from home. A lot of workers have been using laptops as their desktop computers, and they would remote into a virtual PC. There is no difficulty, and they can't tell the difference between this and the real one. It is much easier to manage."
"We then get a 360 degree view of the infrastructure, hardware, networking, storage, VMs, and more."
"Hyper-V is a good product with some limitations, and we can suggest it to customers who mostly prefer Windows."
"The most valuable feature is being able to do checkpoints then roll back to the checkpoint because that's what we need to test the software. We're testing the installation and then we roll it back and retest it."
"The replication, creation, and import wizard, as well as the integration with reporting tools, are the most useful features."
"We can perform maintenance on equipment during the day because we can live migrate all of the machines from one server to another."
"You can centrally manage multiple Hyper-V hosts rather easy with no extra licensing fees vs VMware vCenter."
"It's scalable."
"The price is the solution's most valuable aspect; it's much cheaper than, for example, VMware, so companies can save money using it if they need to."
"What they provide is way beyond the essential requirements of customers."
"Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor has robust virtualization management features with proven enterprise security and performance."
"The solution makes migration easy."
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support portal."
"It is easy to deal with when comes to application migration and its compatibility with the multiple component applications."
"In my opinion, the best features of RHEV are that it is a real hypervisor and it is free, so it performs better than VMware."
 

Cons

"It lacks a built-in cloning function, you have to use the traditional export/import."
"I think the console could use some improvement for the backups."
"The costs in regards to upgrading the solution are quite high and it deters customers from changing versions."
"Hyper-V could have been much leaner and much more powerful, but it becomes only the Hyper-V part of it."
"The operating system is very, very heavy."
"I'd like to see better predictive diagnostics, so I know what's going on with the machines."
"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."
"In general, based on my little experience with Hyper-V, I see a lot of obstacles. I think it falls behind the other competitors."
"RHEV is not improving because it has been discontinued. It has been discontinued for years."
"I heard that there are big differences between Red Hat eight and seven, but it's still quite difficult for me to judge it. I found it a bit more difficult to manage than version seven, which was much easier. In term of features, though, it is still not yet clear which is better. I have no clear idea of which features need to be changed at the moment."
"Load balancing not very efficient and fails to utilize and distribute network resources."
"We would like the dashboard feature of this solution to be improved, as it is not very detailed at present."
"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."
"Its scalability can be improved. It is not easy to scale, and we hope that Red Hat can provide a more scalable system."
"The solution has a very small lifecycle."
"The initial setup is not simple or straightforward. It's very complex."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Microsoft Hyper-V is not expensive and is easy to set up."
"The product's price is low."
"Hyper-V is part of Windows Server, so there are no extra costs for the product."
"We chose this solution because of the pricing and the simplicity of the product."
"There is nothing extra required for Hyper-V apart from the licenses that one purchases to use Microsoft Windows."
"Thanks to our enterprise agreement with Microsoft, Hyper-V is free for us."
"It's not expensive."
"I do not have experience with pricing or licensing of the product."
"I believe we pay on a yearly basis."
"We buy a license for commercial use, and we also use the free editions."
"Price-wise, RHEV is okay, in my opinion."
"The solution does not require licencing but a subscription is necessary, which is very affordable."
"Its price depends on the use cases."
"The price of RHEV is high. It is an open-source solution, the price should be less. The price should not be on par with a solution, such as VMware. It's not more or equal to VMware, it's less, but the difference should be more substantial."
"We have to pay extra for vulnerability and fault tolerance."
"This is an open-source solution."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Server Virtualization Software solutions are best for your needs.
890,027 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

VL
CIO at Robusta Technology & Training
Jan 13, 2015
vSphere vs. RHEV vs. Hyper-V vs. XenServer
We have used the following functions: 1. Hypervisor: to ensure that the virtual server provide web and email services to the company, thus providing a stable operation a with single sign-on integration of an AD server and vCenter. 2. Network and Storage: centralized data server…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business70
Midsize Enterprise37
Large Enterprise46
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

How does KVM compare with Hyper-V?
KVM is better. But let's just look at the software instead of judging. Hyper-V was a free solution from Microsoft to virtualize Server or Client OS as it is a feature on Windows Server since 2008 a...
How does Proxmox VE compare with Hyper-V?
One of the best things about Proxmox VE is that it is open-source and very inexpensive. You get all of the same features as with the more well-known products. Proxmox VE is very easy to deploy - it...
What do you like most about Hyper-V?
The initial setup is not difficult at all. It is very easy.
What do you like most about RHEV?
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for RHEV?
It's the open source. There's not much cost. It's very minimal comparably. Compared to what I am paying for VMware, it's negligible.
What needs improvement with RHEV?
RHEV is not improving because it has been discontinued. It has been discontinued for years. I would love to get back into RHEV, but the job market is difficult and no one is hiring. RHEV is designe...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Large customer base from all industries, all over the world. Two major Hyper-V customers are Telefonica and EmpireCLS.
Qualcomm and Bonham's Auction House.
Find out what your peers are saying about Hyper-V vs. RHEV and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
890,027 professionals have used our research since 2012.