RHEV Reviews

Many of our customers are moving to open source-based technology and VMware is leading the virtualization space, but slowly customers are moving to open source and Red Hat is the leader in this particular space. I think customers feel more confident running Red Hat Virtualization than VMware. And if you talk about a lot of other features that VMware provides, Red Hat does that too. I mean, it's not only Red Hat, I would say, Oracle and Red Hat, both of them are providing good capabilities. I think customers like this.

In terms of cost, VMware is really expensive for many of the customers, so that is another reason why they want to switch to these technologies.

Most of the time we're engaged with the kind of discussion where we have to compare them with VMware. So when we do a direct comparison, then obviously VMware does better in terms of having Fault Tolerance and doing active disaster recovery and these kind of things. This is something that can be improved within Red Hat. That is one aspect.

But when you talk about the latest changes that are happening, I think both VMware and Red Hat are working on something like virtualization on top of the Kubernetes platform, so I think that will take it to altogether a different level. Because Red Hat is working on OpenShift Virtualization, and I think VMware has its own Tanzu, they both are competing well.

I think the future looks good for both of them. Red Hat may beat VMware in terms of when you compare it with OpenShift Virtualization. But looking at the present KVM, I don't know what things are going to look like.

In terms of what can be improved, I can't say right now because I don't know how much they are willing to do that or their roadmap looks like for this technology. In virtualization, like I mentioned, I think there are a lot of things that they are doing. In fact to be very frank, I'm not aware of the latest container-based virtualization that they're working on or what kind of features they have, so I'm not in the right position. I can't comment on that.

I have been using RHEV for at most a couple of years now.

I am not a system admin and not into the infrastructure. My role is mostly on solution architecture infrastructure so I don't do hands-on on these technologies, but I have my basic lab set up where I play around with them because my job is to provide solutions and advice for customers. That's how I am engaged with it.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give RHEV a nice eight.

I would definitely recommend for people to use Red Hat Virtualization. That is for sure.

The price is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's much cheaper than, for example, VMware.

The interface is a bit complex, in my opinion. They should work to simplify it if possible.

Currently, we cannot get a direct local resource mount. 

When I want to customize the solution, I would like to have a similar operating system resource included, similar to what VMware offers. We'd like to have the same hosting features VMware has.

I've been using the solution for about two years now.

In comparison to VMware, this solution isn't as stable. We're testing it right now, and we're not trusting the stability of the product.

We only two people working on the solution currently, as we test it. We haven't scaled it at all.

The technical support offered by Red Hat is average. It's not exceptional, but it's not bad either.

I didn't set up the solution at our organization. I don't know if it is complex or straightforward in terms of implementation.

The solution is quite inexpensive.

I wouldn't recommend the solution currently. We don't trust the product, so to use it as a mission-critical solution wouldn't be advised. However, overall, it's okay.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. Red Hat solution is not the best, in my opinion. It's not as stable, but it is much cheaper than VMware, so companies can save money using it if they need to.

On-premises

We use the product primarily for creating and managing virtual machines.

The product has benefitted our organization in terms of cost savings and efficient resource utilization by centrally creating and managing virtual machines.

While the platform has proven beneficial, it could be improved in some areas. Specifically, enhancements in managing virtual machine migrations, cloning, and the creation of different VMs could further optimize its functionality.

I've worked with RHEV for around three years.

I rate the platform's stability an eight out of ten. 

The platform is scalable, allowing for the installation of multiple nodes. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support services are good. 

RHEV offers pricing based on socket pair per-physical-machine licensing model. 

One aspect to note is that the platform's disaster recovery needs to be managed manually, underscoring the importance of having hypervisors on different physical servers for redundancy.

Given that RHEV is nearing the end of its product life cycle, I would advise exploring alternative solutions. However, it remains an enterprise-grade solution, akin to other Red Hat products, and is well-suited for virtualization needs in an enterprise environment.

Overall, I rate it an eight out of ten. 

The primary use case was running an entire government payroll system.

Basically stability and speed are the most valuable aspects.

Realistically, I found Red Hat to be fairly usable. It was an easy transition from Unix to using Linux and I can't think of any real improvements necessary. If anything, I actually like check config better than system CTL.

For improvements or additional features, it would be nice for it to integrate better into two in ones. If you wanted to go to the desktop computer side of things, it lags behind in that you need to go to something like Fedora to get all the extra bells and whistles.

I used the product for 10 years. 

The product is stable.

The product scaled very well. The only issues that we have ever really had was in relation to the Oracle database that we're running.

I previously used VMware and then Citrix. We made the switch predominantly because we wanted to consolidate licensing. We were using Citrix for our VDI environment and it made sense to shift from VMware to Citrix Zen because the licensing for the actual ZenServer was embedded within our DDI license. It made no sense actually licensing a product that we could actually utilize within our existing license. When you look at the budgetary figures and everything like that, VM ware is not exactly light on the back pocket.

For me, the initial setup was fairly straightforward and because I've been using it for so long I was able to do it myself. In terms of initial deployment, I was able to run up five DMs running Red Hat with Oracle database within a week. 

Several options were evaluated. I need to keep up to date on all technical offerings on the market, so it was really about doing a product comparison.

I've always used separate hypervisors so it's difficult for me to give advice. I'm more familiar with the other products so I would rate this product a six out of 10. 

On-premises

We have several applications that are pillars of the business, such as ERP and SAP, which were previously in a Windows environment. Our system architects have been working on moving these applications to a Linux environment. This is why we are using this solution.

At the point, all of our work with Red Hat is on-premises.

One of the most valuable features of this solution is the popularity of the OS.

The support for this solution is very good. This is the major thing that we are considering with respect to moving platforms.

There has to be more effort into closing the security vulnerabilities in this solution because we are facing daily attacks. We would like to have this done faster.

We would like to see live-patching on the systems, without having to require a reboot. 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.

Improvements can be made to managing this solution, such as enhancements to the GUI.

There should be better integration with third-party tools.

Tools for scanning the hardware, such as the CPU and memory, would make life easier.

We have been using this solution for about two years.

I have found that the stability is related to the upgrade cycle. I find the cycle a little bit annoying.  If the system is constantly upgrading then it is very painful in terms of the operation.

In terms of scalability, it is handling the load that we have. I don't see any major problems.

In addition to using this solution, we are trying to move our CRP solutions to our other platform, SUSE Linux. All of our business applications are moving to Red Hat, although we are getting better support with SUSE.

We are not using the most current release of this solution because from our perspective, it is not mature enough yet.

Another example is that we are moving our Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution, which is similar to Microsoft SharePoint, to Red Hat.

We have already moved all of our big data systems, as well as all of the digitalization systems to Red Hat. Our Splunk is also on Red Hat. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

In my company, I am working in a strategic department. My primary task in the company at the present time is looking into an overall roadmap for our organization to adopt a virtualization solution. We are doing this mostly for cost optimization.  

So I am exploring the potential benefits of different solutions and what the potential options are for us to minimize and optimize the costs and our overall tax expenditures by bringing in these VMware solutions.  

Our goal is hosting multiple applications within one single host. The purpose is to reduce the number of physical servers and then to move from a physical to a virtual environment. This is the reason that we introduced the VMware solution.  

So VMware is basically purely on the virtual environment that we have adopted because we are moving out from a physical environment to a virtual environment where we have deployed some VMware licenses to manage our various systems applications on one single host.  

Of course, VMware is not an OS by itself. When it comes to the operating system, we are leveraging on the Red Hat virtual environment to be able to run and support the integration of multiple systems. So the VMware is being used to host the virtual environment. We have actually a combination of both Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and VMware virtualization solutions to create the needed environment to meet these goals.  

Red Hat Enterprise has provided the flexible platform on which we can build the solution we envisioned of hosting multiple applications in a single host.  

The most valuable feature in this product is that it is easy for us to deal with when comes to application migration and its compatibility with the multiple component applications that are available. For example, we have Drupal, Magento, Node.js, and other applications to host. So when we are looking for a base system solution that is able to support all of these components, I look to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. It provides a lot of flexibility in terms of compute scaling, resource allocation, and also the stability of the platform.  

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is giving us more benefits in these situations because it is stable. This makes it easy to do this migration and easy to manage as well.  

There are two things that I would like to see improvement in when it comes to Red Hat. First is the pricing and second is the support. Of those two, I think support should be the main focus.  

We are facing some challenges within Malaysia because we do not really have system integrators for Red Hat available who can provide on-site support. This would be useful in critical situations such as outages. At those times, it would be optimal to have an expert technician who has significant experience with the product on the company site to help us more quickly resolve these critical issues.  

The closest that we have come to this within Malaysia was an instance where we had to join an online conference call. It was complicated and inefficient. We had to bridge the connection with the principals, login, and then to check and to dump the data for the troubleshooting purposes.  

If Red Hat can expand their services to include physical support within Malaysia then it would be great for us. We need to have access to immediate support of this type when it comes to critical issues.  

I have been working with Red Hat Virtualization for between 10 and 15 years.  

Red Hat Virtualization is a stable and versatile solution.  

We have close to 20 users now and I do not see a problem with the potential for scaling that and the use of the product to further build out our environment.  

We have some issues with getting on-site support in Malasia. This is an issue for critical situations.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I can rate Red Hat Virtualization as a seven-out-of-ten.  

It is a seven and not higher because of the various issues like lack of availability of on-site support.  

Even with these issues, I would definitely recommend Red Hat virtualization to other customers who are actually looking into moving from a physical environment to a virtualized environment. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization can help to optimize their space utilization and optimize their costs.  

Few pros of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor are- 1) Kernel based virtual machine(KVM) virtualization technology 2) Good application compatibility and interface 3) Memory page sharing 4) NIC bonding 5) Multipath I/O 6) Efficient guest consolidation, live migration and HA 7) SELinux for enhanced security

Few cons of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor are1) Need to create virtual machine environment per node 2) Issues with clustering 3) Load balancing not very efficient and fails to utilize and distribute network resources.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor is an enterprise virtualization solution made by Red Hat. It has been designed for intergration with Virtualization manager with servers. It has robust virtualization management features with proven enterprise security and performance. This Hypervisor is basically based on Kernel Based Virtual Machine. It has inbuilt features such as live migration, high availability (which manages server availability), and zero downtime for the virtual machines.

The solution has a good licensing module.

The UI should be more interactive with more features. In terms of virtualization product services the features are very limited. I'd like to see additional functionality and net virtualization features.

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Technical support is reasonable. 

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. One system administrator is sufficient for maintenance. 

Licensing costs are very reasonable. 

We previously evaluated VMware ESXI and Hyper V.

I recommend this solution. It will save money and you can also leverage the benefit of virtualization of unlimited caps.

I rate this solution seven out of 10.