RHEV alternatives and competitors

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.

We are a company who sells the solution to end users and we're a business partner with Red Hat. I'm an IT project consultant 

The valuable features of this solution are that it's open source, non-proprietary, and we can do just about anything we want to with the codes. There are no legal issues stopping us and of course Red Hat is rock solid and very stable.

To be honest, I can't think of anything that needs improving, they work faster than I do and produce things so quickly and swiftly that I can't catch up with them. Before I can think of something new, they are already there and have done it. What they have right now is way beyond the essential requirements of our customers who would not require more than 20%-30% of what they offer.

There aren't any additional features I can think of that should be included. They're already offering hyper convergence which is way beyond the world for us and beyond what ordinary users could imagine having. Maybe one day they'll come up with a way of running their software without any hardware.

This is a very stable solution. 

Scalability depends on the applications. Red Hat by itself is not scalable. But you can have third party add-ons like Ceph to make it massively scalable.

The technical support is very different from what most vendors are currently selling or providing to their customers. Because of the nature of the product, it's ongoing and subscription based. You don't pay for new versions, it doesn't exist in the open source world. As long as the customer pays their annual subscription, they receive all the updates automatically. Support is more towards the end users on the day-to-day things.

If you're comparing it to larger solutions like VMware, the setup is slightly more complex because it requires a lot of technical knowledge. But the offset is that once you cross that hurdle, your system is super reliable. And it works and works. We have servers that have been running for the past eight years without having to be turned off.

Red Hat is easily three to five times cheaper than the nearest competitor. Our business model is slightly different. If you look at Gerome HCI, for example, the core product that we sell, it is not Red Hat based but certain components use Red Hat components, for example, sales and subscription. It would cost about $USD5,000 per year to keep that going. Instead, we charge slightly more initially, maybe $USD7,000-$8,000, and then reduce the annual support fee to maybe $USD1,000.

There are other platforms like Proxmox that are very stable and good because they run on KVM just like we do. But if you have hands-on experience with Proxmox, for example, you know that the entire thing is full of buttons and switches and I believe most clients don't like that. Red Hat, and Gerome HCI keep that to a minimum and give the customers what they need to do to get their work done.

I would suggest people take a serious look at Red Hat and open source, and what KVM offerings can provide to end users. KVM and Red Hat, the open source community, are different to what they were 10 years ago. They are so advanced today and so mature in what they do that they could easily give any top-notch industry leaders a run for their money. They are definitely the market leader in terms of open source. No one can beat them at the moment.

I would rate this product a 10 out of 10. 

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.