KVM Reviews

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. 

My primary use case for KVM is running multiple VMs and containers on the one node.

I find the density of the product most valuable. It is because of kernel same page merging technology (KSM) that is integrated into Linux kernel. That high density makes KVM one of the important players of the virtualization market.

In the future release of KVM, I would like to have improved support for Windows guests.

The stability of this solution is less than other products in the same category. But, it is OK. 

The scalability of the product is really high because of architecture. Since KVM is part of a Linux kernel, it gets a lot of the benefits of its location. It has a nice strategy of memory virtualization, which is also part of the kernel. Kernel location makes possible schemes of a vhost that boosts device performance.

We currently have 300 users of KVM, with about two people as support staff. We do plan to increase usage in the future. So, we will be scaling up in the future.

The KVM technical support is really bad. It has a number of empty channels for support. We have tried emails, as well. But, if you are not part of the community, they will not answer your request. 

We previously used VMware. 

The initial setup was simple because KVM is used in Linux, so to get it out of the box is a simple task. But, the deployment is not an easy task. It takes a lot of installation suites. You could use a lot of additional products or improvements, like Red Hat virtualization that makes deployment of virtual machines simple. But, out of the box deployment is not that good.

This solution came with the Linux license.

• Low cost, if not lowest.
• Great performance and scalability.
• Security is top-notch.
• Free.

Networking configuration might be annoying depending on how you want to set it up; usually works fine, though.

I have used it for one year.

We have not encountered any deployment issues.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Well, none.

Unless you can count open forums?

I previously used VMware VM VirtualBox and then Workstation Pro. I switched because VMware is not free.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I implemented it in-house.

Since I invested 0 dollars on KVM and just as much time as you would think is worth... you do the math.