KVM Reviews

The most valuable feature of KVM is the hypervisor environment and how we can configure it with ease. Additionally, the interface is intuitive.

I have been using KVM for approximately two years.

KVM is a stable solution.

I have found KVM to be scalable.

The technical support has been good, we are able to receive help for complex environments.

I have previously used VMware and KVM is easier to use. However, they both have their strengths depending on their use cases. They are mostly equal. One of VMware's advantages is it has better support.

The initial setup of KVM is simple.

KVM is priced reasonably.

I rate KVM an eight out of ten.

KVM runs virtualized guests with its own kernel, which is very important to me.

I mainly use it for customer projects, as KVM allows running virtualized environments for free in a very efficient way. Furthermore, it is an open source solution so modifying the code is possible. One might think that this is never necessary for most projects; however, when a specific customer requested an enhancement of the functionality, I was able to provide that. The customer was very impressed that KVM is such a professional solution although it is free.

Over the years, many customers were happy that they were able to choose between VMware, Xen and another alternative - KVM.

Setting KVM up and running it with dozens of parameters can be annoying. However, there is a control interface called Virsh (and also a GUI called virt-manager) which allows running KVM guests with a simple config file.

I have been using KVM since 2010, so for fives years in total.

So far, no issues.

When running I/O intensive tasks, or having a very high amount of network packages which need to reach the guest(s). However, all issues were under control after tuning the config of the KVM guests.

No issues yet.

There is no customer service, only the community. It is a free product, based on open source software. However, one can use RHEV (the enterprise virtualization product from Red Hat), then you will be able to contact the Red Hat support.

I used Xen in the past and switched because the customers requested a solution which allows running a guest with its own Kernel. This is also possible with Xen, but not a common use case, though.

The initial setup, when done manually, is complex because you need to be an experienced Linux user or admin, especially as the networking part can be challenging.

I always deploy it on my own.

It is free! Use it and if you need enterprise support, make sure to use RHEV, the virtualization product from Red Hat.

No, because in the open source world, there are not many hypervisors which have the same feature set as KVM.

Make sure to gain a lot of knowledge about virtualization and the way KVM works. Then implement it with libvirt and virt-manager because this makes running KVM guests a lot easier.

KVM is very difficult to manage and run on daily operations. It's also too dependent on other solutions and has no backend customization.

I've been using KVM for five to six years.

KVM's stability is fine, assuming it's running on decent hardware.

KVM is scalable, but it requires a certain amount of technical knowledge to understand how it can scale to other locations.

The initial setup was very easy.

I implemented KVM myself.

KVM is free.

I would give KVM a rating of eight out of ten.

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 integrate KVM as part of our product. I'm the CTO of our company. 

The solution is very cost-effective. VMware is exorbitantly priced and compared with other products KVM is much cheaper especially in the public cloud scenario.

Their support for snapshot and revert could be improved. I'd also like to see the product achieve high availability across clusters and to have more support for Apache CloudStack.

I've been using this solution for over a year. 

We haven't had any issues with stability. 

Scalability is fine, no problems at all. 

We have worked with certain support vendors and they're fine. In particular, we work with one of the Red Hat partners and we're quite happy.

The complexity or otherwise of the initial setup depends on the situation but generally it's not too difficult. We offer our customers maintenance support which generally involves update patching.

KVM offers both an open source and licensed version. 

Before deployment, it's worth checking whether the solution fits your use case and how it would be used across various large deployments. Test it before implementing. 

I rate the solution seven out of 10. 

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.