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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 19.1%, up from 14.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of RHEV is 2.4%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Virtualization Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Hyper-V19.1%
RHEV2.4%
Other78.5%
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's scalable."
"All in all, Microsoft Hyper-V is an excellent platform and a great competitor for VMWare."
"This solution helps us with production of our office business needs."
"Live Migration in a virtual machine where you can move across your Hyper-V physical servers with or without user interaction, and in a virtual machine you can move from server to server without downtime."
"The most valuable feature is that it's an end-to-end solution."
"The solution is very stable."
"The product is not difficult to set up."
"Microsoft has documentation that is easy to find, helpful, and readily available."
"The biggest aspect for me is the disk usage, the virtual manager, and the deployment of machines."
"I advise keeping an open mind. It's an excellent solution."
"The solution makes migration easy."
"Red Hat is the most stable system; it's better than other OS solutions."
"When any organization needs end-to-end infrastructure deployment, configuration management, and automation, then RHEV is the best fit."
"Performance and security are key advantages of RHEV."
"Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization can help to optimize their space utilization and optimize their costs."
"The solution is a great all-round product, and the virtualization is especially good."
 

Cons

"I would love to see other options for connecting VMs to large data storage."
"I think the areas for improvements in the product are reporting and best practices detection."
"Hyper-V is a stable solution, but not as stable as VMware."
"We've had many issues with Hyper-V's stability, including resource crunches and memory leakage."
"The operating system is very, very heavy."
"The Hyper-V management console could be improved to make it easier. It should be a little bit more granular. Various virtual switches could also be improved to make virtual desk management slightly better. The replication could be improved slightly. The checkpoints or snapshots could be improved to make it a bit more transparent to the user."
"If you have a bigger implementation, you need more tools to coexist with many, many features that are not present in the base Hyper-V."
"All the actions are manual, and if customization is needed, it is difficult with Hyper-V."
"A few features of the product do not work as well as those in VMware."
"The initial setup is not simple or straightforward. It's very complex."
"The support is tricky in a few places. We're facing some challenges within Malaysia where we don't really have the system integrators available who can provide extended support."
"The GUI interface needs improvement. Not 90%, but 50% or 60% of the work is done from the command line and so on, so the GUI needs work because people are looking for an easier way to manage the environment."
"The biggest improvement would be more third-party direct support for things like backups and provisioning through third-party portals."
"It lags behind in that you need to go to something like Fedora to get all the extra bells and whistles."
"Configuring the network interfaces is much better in Ubuntu and should be improved."
"We have found the technical support for this solution to be very slow in responding to our requests for assistance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I do not have experience with the pricing or the licensing of the product."
"I think it is expensive. I think if they want it to be more competitive, they should lower the price."
"The licensing is good for a data center environment."
"Once we bought the datacenter version of the server, we did away with worrying about the cost of licensing our VMs separately"
"It comes with all the features and goodies inside the box, so you do not have to purchase anything else."
"I wish the licensing was simpler, and allowed for a greater number of VM's with the Microsoft standard licensing, but overall I think it's fair. The pricing is definitely fair."
"The license is free."
"The price is quite fair. It is not too expensive."
"This product has a variety of licensing options available. However, the level of licensing, and therefore the cost of licensing, is dependent on the number of servers being utilized."
"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."
"I would say the price is acceptable."
"We have to pay extra for vulnerability and fault tolerance."
"We buy a license for commercial use, and we also use the free editions."
"RHEV offers pricing based on a per-physical-machine licensing model."
"The solution does not require licencing but a subscription is necessary, which is very affordable."
"It's a budget product as far as I'm concerned. It's way cheaper than any of its competitors. The only thing cheaper than Red Hat is that the people who take the Red Hat code clone it and then self-support it."
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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
9%
University
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
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: March 2026.
885,837 professionals have used our research since 2012.