KVM Reviews

We are a consulting company and I work with a lot of solutions to compare them and find out which ones are good for my customers.

The primary use case for this solution is virtualization.

I use this solution in on-premises data centers.

Compared to other virtualization solutions KVM is much faster and better at managing resources. For example, we compared XEN, KVM, and Vmware for creating development infrastructure for our programmers, we ended up using KVM.

The GUI interface makes the management of KVM easier than ever before.

The performance of this solution is great.

This solution is lacking in features such as management and integration.

• This solution needs better integration with desktop virtualization.
• Better integration with storage solutions is needed.
• Business continuity features need to be added.
• The live migration needs to be improved.
• You cannot run this application in a data center using only the GUI, so you have to have some knowledge with Linux in order to best manage it.
• Better network management software is needed.
• Features like vSAN are not available on KVM.
• Integration with Kubernetes would be an improvement.

Generally, this solution should be made easier to use. Many customers don't have enough experience with Linux or a deep understanding of operating systems, and they just want to use the product. This together with a lack of features has led customers to choose VMware.

I have been working with this solution for more than ten years.

This solution is limited in terms of scalability. I think that it is suitable for a mid-range company, but for a larger company, it is not quick. It does not have features for companies that need expandable solutions.

This solution is not used directly by the end-users. If KVM is installed in their data center then they just use the virtual machine. Users don't care about infrastructure, they're just looking for stability and use the operating system for their service. It is the administrators who use this product. Typically, there are two or three administrators in each data center. In terms of end-users, I have seen more than one hundred concurrent users.

We do not have access to Red Hat support from our country.

For technical support we depend on the internet and the knowledge of our administrators.

I have used XenServer and VMware, and the performance of KVM is better than these.

When it comes to management, integration, business continuity, and live migration, KVM is lacking features and VMware is better in this area.

The initial setup of this solution is not hard, but when you want to use this product in your data center, you have to use the command-line interface to better manage it. You cannot run this application using the GUI alone, so if you don't have enough knowledge with Linux then you may have some trouble.

Most of our solutions are implemented in-house as well as this one.

This solution can be used for free but if you have an expert team on Linux OS, select this one. if you don't have them, forget about it.

I evaluate options such as XenServer, VMware, and KVM every six months in order to choose the best product for my customers.

I have been using this solution since before it was owned by Red Hat, when it was community-based. It is easier to manage than ever before because you used to have to use the command-line interface, instead of the GUI.

I do not recommend this product for those looking for a stable and scalable virtualization solution because they will ultimately have problems in their data center. Just two weeks ago, I helped a friend of mine to migrate from KVM to VMware.

I think that if Red Hat worked on some business continuity features and add them to KVM then it would receive a better grade and be a more competitive solution.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

It gives us live VM migrations.

It allows us to virtualize our entire IT Infrastructure without any software cost. We only need to spend money on support and deployment.

Used since 2009 from version 0.8, so 6 years now.

No.

No.

It's scaled for us since version 0.8.

The main use case is, of course, to run virtual machines. The specific use case is to run virtual network functions (VNFs) and the performance is very good on KVM.

A big strength with KVM is that it is an open-source component. It gets improvements from Intel, for example, and the other semiconductors. It can be sized-down to a very small package. It can be used in embedded systems as well, so it has a very good performance and it is suitable from embedded IT to big servers and supercomputers.

This solution integrates nicely with other soft-open-software components.

I would like to see a separation, so you could have KVM running in a few cores, and then you could have a real-time operating system running another core, so there is a hybrid environment with real time operating systems and Linux.

The stability is very good. It has not crashed once since we have been using it. 

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 scales really well.

Technical support is not top-notch.

I think this solution is in need of an easier installation process.

It is cheaper than other competitors like VMware or Hyper-V.

We compared KVM vs VMware and did a proof-of-concept, but we decided that KVM was best suited for our needs when it came to device drivers, etc. We also considered Oracle and RedHat.

We are using KVM across our company for virtualization.

In our setup, we do not have any dashboards or orchestration, and it is hard to manage. We have 25 gig network cards, but the software driver we have only supported 10 gigs.

I have used KVM within the last 12 months.

KVM is stable.

We have used Baremetal.

There are different types of implementations and the current implementation we had, we did not spend enough time to optimize it for a highly demanding production environment. We were not running the most sensitive applications in that environment. Where we needed performance we run Baremetal. In the near future, we are going into cloud-native Kubernetes space as well.

We had some problems with the licensing.

We have evaluated Kubernetes.

We have had a lot of problems with the solution but it is not the fault of KVM. It was our fault for not doing a full suite deployment.

I rate KVM a seven out of ten.

We are no longer using this solution. We evaluated it, but I have not used it in a production environment.

This solution is used for virtualization.

We have an on-premises deployment.

same features that vmware have concerning disaster recovery, high availibility and live motion of vm

simplicity of installation

full interoprability with vm format (ova, ovf, ..) for been aable to move forward or backward to another virtualization solution

We did not test scalability during our evaluation.

We are currently using VMware in our production environment.

The initial setup of this solution is quite simple.

Our primary use for this product is server virtualization.

There is a lot of value with an open source solution because you have some freedom of changing how the system behaves and looks because it's open source. You can modify to your requirements which you cannot really do with VMware.

The management of the whole system, could be improved. VMware is better on the management tools, for example, Red Hat is when it comes to the KVM.

In addition, 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.

It is a verty stable solution.

We have over 1000 users using the solution currently. 

If I were to rate the technical support on a scale of one to five, I would give it a four. We received good support and there is an on-site presence, as well. 

We previously used VMware but switched to KVM because it is an open ecosystem and we see there is a benefit in open source solutions.

It's very straightforward because there are a lot of examples of how to use it. 

It is cheaper than other solutions out there on the market.

We also evaluated Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical(Ubuntu), and other Linux providers.

Great support for many types of hardware, disks, memory, RAID controllers, etc.

In the Linux world, KVM is a very reliable solution which can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with reasonable overhead. Reliable and extensible have a tight integration with Linux security facilities, like SELinux, KVM does the job.

You will unlikely see KVM if you are using a cloud solution because of it is a seamless integration. If instead 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.

KVM has a rich options set which can be directly used or via wrappers, such as libvirt.

Our infrastructure is based on KVM and Linux Containers (LXC). We had a lot of VMware legacy, but it was converted to Ubuntu and KVM hypervisor for about the last year. Management and backup is a lot easier with with Ubuntu and KVM, especially combined with ZFS and snapshotting.

The support of virtualization in the recent generation of x86 processor is almost a must have, so 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.

It is free and can be run from your laptop, if needed, unlike VMware.

I'm a technical solution manager and we are customers of KVM. 

The screen and keyboard sharing feature is valuable. 

Monitoring and resolution are features which could be improved and I've found that if the product has not been used for some time, it needs to be re-set. 

I've been using this solution for over three years.

When the product is used frequently, it's stable, but if we don't touch it for some time, it needs to get synchronized again with the VGA or the HDMI, and there can be problems with that. 

The initial setup is not complex, but sometimes there's a problem and we need to unplug the cable in order to connect to the system.

I rate this solution a seven out of 10.