RHEV Reviews

We are a computer service company with several partnership. We are partners with HPE, Cisco, IBM, VMware, Red Hat, just to mention. We provide data centers solutions, with Hardware, Networking, Security, and Software. Also, we have our data center and we are offering cloud solutions for others.

We are deploying Red Hat products for our cloud solutions. And our cloud is Red Hat Virtualization based, and soon we will have another cloud Red Hat OpenStack based.

For the cloud solutions, we're in the marketing and sales stage. We are planning to build software solutions for clients in addition to what we will be offered publicly. We have a lot of clients in petroleum and banking sectors. For our clients, we are planning to offer them the best solutions for their activities on the cloud.

We have two branches, our headquarter is in Tripoli and we have a branch in Benghazi. Between the two offices, there are around 28 engineers acting in providing solutions.

Because of my background is in Open Source, the number one feature is it is open source. This means all Open Source features are included. So, I can control and manage everything. This is the best part for me. 

Also, Red Hat products are easy to use.

The documentation is not as good as it should be. There is a need for making it descriptive and in sequence. There are a lot of links in the docs and some parts are repeated.

Technically, Red Hat products are robust and durable with an excellent support.

I have been using this solution for a few months.

It is stable

It's very scalable. We haven't experienced any issues.

Whenever there's an issue or problem, I contact customer support and they take it seriously. They're very cooperative. They are always quick in response. They are very, very supportive.

We are using VMware and for a time, just for virtualization. Now we are going to work on clouds. Therefore, we want to move ahead with Red Hat to use either private, hybrid, or public cloud. We want our data center to offer cloud solutions for our clients.

Because of the miss-organized  documents, it was a bit difficult in the beginning. Once it went on, it became very easy. Overall, it's a very smooth and straightforward process.

Deployment took a couple of weeks. I did it in-house because we are a Red Hat partner, and there's no subscription and support for partners.

I am not fully sure, but I believe we pay on a yearly basis. 

I would definitely recommend this solution. Everywhere the cloud is the choice and by offering this solution locally this give it a plus. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine. 

On-premises

Enterprise Virtualization is for specific customers. We are an integrator and we have some customers who want to have in their data center or in their office a virtualization solution. This solution is perfect for that type of client.

To be clear, for us to use Red Hat, we need an OpenStack platform. Red Hat OpenStack is a Red Hat platform based on OpenStack to make a public cloud platform. Regarding the features we find valuable, we use all the stack on this platform including the network, storage, compute and controller management and they all work well.

There aren't any bugs on the solution.

The UI is based on a default. It's not bad, but it could be a bit better.

The solution could improve its pricing.

We'd like it if it would be possible on Red Hat Virtualization to possibly connect two or three VMs to the same disk.

We have been using the solution has been for about five or six years now.

The solution is quite stable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It works well. It's reliable.

We don't need the assistance of any outside technical support. Currently, we have our own engineers on that. We have about 35 engineers so we don't need to contact their support, but for some debugging or specific cases, we may sometimes need some help to run on the platform. In those instances, we can open tickets if we need to.

We'd like to move to OpenStack for clients that are looking for an internal cloud solution that's private.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We have 10 support engineers that handle maintenance.

As an integrator, we set up the solution for our clients.

We're integrators. We have a partnership with Red Hat.

In our country, we have two business segments. We have cloud and integration segments. Regarding the integration, we help clients layout their requirements or the needs and propose what we can do for the requirement. If the customer wants to have a POC to see how the solution works, we can do POC for them and so on.

We specifically use the cloud version of the solution, because it's to provide cloud solutions to our end customers. We have built our cloud solution on Red Hat and our end clients like to change it can have a private tenant to manage their own virtual machine, their networks, and their routers, and so on. We have many, many end customers on the platform.

Some of our clients currently use Red Hat Virtualization and they are looking for a private cloud solution now. We probably need to migrate the existing Red Hat Virtualization to the Red Hat OpenStack platform for these clients.

It's a very good solution. It works very well. We haven't had any issues with any technical aspects and it works well.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Public Cloud

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. 

Private Cloud

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.  

The solution is easy for us to deal with when comes to application migration and has good compatibility with multiple components. For example, we have Drupal, Magento and then Node.js. When we are looking at which particular solution to run or maybe the base system to support these components, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is the perfect choice.

The solution offers flexibility in terms of computation scaling and resource allocation.

The platform is very stable. 

The solution makes migration easy.

The management of the solution is very simple.

The pricing could be improved.

The support is tricky in a few places. We're facing some challenges within Malaysia where we don't really have the system integrators available who can provide extended support. When we need personnel on-site, we can't get them.  

Instead, we have to join in an online conference call and then bridge the connection with the principals, log in and then check and dump the data for troubleshooting purposes, etc.

We've been dealing with the solution for about 15 years now.

We can't really get on-site support here in Malaysia. It's a problem for us. When we need help, we need to do a conference call, but it's difficult for us and it's not an ideal situation.

The pricing is a bit expensive.

We still have Red Hat version five running on our environment.

We don't have Red Hat in Malaysia. We don't have direct contact with Red Hat. We have to go through either distributors or system integrators in order to get the product.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

I would recommend Red Hat virtualization to other customers who are actually looking into moving from a physical environment to virtualization environment. It will optimize their space utilization and their cost optimization. 

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

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 been using RHEV in both on-premises and cloud deployments for testing.

In my team, we don't have access to a paid version of Red Hat. Instead, we mostly use CentOS and Ubuntu.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the support portal.

Configuring the network interfaces is much better in Ubuntu and should be improved. I find this to be the biggest problem. In Ubunto they have the idea of the Netplan, which is much better than the facility in Red Hat.

I have been using RHEV for about five months.

I have seen some bugs that I fixed on my own.

We have not had to scale this solution because it is not for everyday use. Rather, we use it for testing purposes.

Technical support for RHEV is very fast and good. 

We use different versions of Linux including CentOS and Ubuntu. CentOS is very comparable to Red Hat because it is almost the same, internally.

In the beginning, the initial setup was quite complex. However, once you get used to it, I would say that the setup is of normal difficulty and not a problem.

I implemented this solution with the assistance of my colleague.

We are using the free version of Red Hat.

RHEV is a good solution and I would rate it a nine out of ten.

On-premises

Technically, the main reason why I'm using Red Hat is because of its stability.

I heard that there are big differences between Red Hat 8 and 7, but it's still quite difficult for me to judge it. I found it a bit more difficult to manage than version seven, which was much easier. In terms of features, though, it is still not yet clear which is better. I have no clear idea of which features need to be changed at the moment.

We've been using this solution for five years.

Scalability is also available. At our company, we have three people managing Red Hat, but about 600 users that use service and hosting of Red Hat.

We are in touch with technical support and whenever we have an issue we get good support from the Red Hat team. I am satisfied with their technical support. I am an Open Source fan so this is one of my favorites.

We use Windows, of course, and we also use Ubuntu for some other applications. For our core applications, however, we use Red Hat.

I would say the price is acceptable.

If someone asked me, I would strongly recommend using Red Hat. I have spoken to many other Red Hat users. The main issue is the lack of knowledge with most engineers and system admins. They don't know how to use Red Hat. They found that Windows, for example, is easier to manage. I would recommend Red Hat, though, and I would like to do something to raise the awareness of how to use Red Hat. I would strongly recommend they work hard to introduce people to Red Hat and how to manage Red Hat. I know there are courses, workshops, and seminars. Red Hat is doing all of that. The main issue which I think Red Hat has to focus on, however, is that colleges, universities, and most institutions focus on Windows-based solutions. Red Hat has to be there in the education sector, so engineer or system admin graduates will at least have a small knowledge of what Red Hat is.

I would rate Red Hat as seven out of ten. I think it's really hard to get a ten because this is technology and technology is always improving. We'll never stop. Ten means perfect, no improvement required. So I would never rate any tech solution as ten or even nine of ten. I can say, however, that this solution is fine for me.

On-premises

The primary use case of this solution is for making DNS, website work, DHCP, and other security functions like ID tables and other tools.

The Administration of the Oracle database and the SAP ERP needs improvement.

In the next release. I would like to see some additional features to make it easier, such as improvements to the GUI and the maintenance. The maintenance of Red Hat is difficult.

I have been using this solution for seventeen years.

Red Hat is the most stable system. It's better than other OS solutions.

At first, this solution was deployed on-premises, then I converted it to cloud using VMware tools to make our private cloud on our data center.

This is an open-source solution.

I have always recommended using other platforms versus Windows. I didn't like using any Windows system, Microsoft system or any system with heavy traffic like ERP and Websites.

I recommend Linux.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The solution is a great all-round product. The virtualization is especially good. 

The GUI interface needs improvement. Not 90%, but 50% or 60% of the work is done from the command line and so on, so the GUI needs work because people are looking for an easier way to manage the environment. Right now, if someone is not very familiar with Red Hat and actually is looking to add Red Hat to the environment, they have to take some training. It needs to be easier to use.

The solution could use network virtualization.

The stability is very good. We've had very good feedback on it.

The solution is very scalable.

The technical support is very good.

The initial setup can be a bit complex, but it depends on the deployment itself.

We are resellers of Red Hat. We deal with various deployment models, however, we generally deal with on-premises.

I would recommend the solution. Of course, it depends on what an organization is looking for in terms of virtualization.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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.

The Ovirt component has flexibility, and is easy to perform integration within a  heterogenous data centre manager with OpenStack or ManageIQ.

It has the possibility to OEM and create a great product with Ovirt as the main component.

It needs a better administrator KB, similar to what Citrix XenDesktop has. Also, they don't know how to sell their great products and don’t really seems to be interested in taking care of their partners who trust and really know their products.

If you have a heterogenous data centre that is specially focused on Linux platforms, this is safe money, and good if you are looking for automation. 

It also offers great integration with DevOps tools.

RHEV costs are very low compared to other Virtualization products. RHEV hypervisor supports up to 160 cores and up to 2 TB of RAM on a host machine. Performance and security are key advantages of RHEV. One of the new features are transparent huge pages, where kernel dynamically creates large memory pages for virtual machines, which improves performance for most workloads by reducing the number of times that memory is accessed. It is open source, which means that it is available for use by every one. There is a “Power user portal” feature that helps developer and IT staff with a self-service interface that allows them to provision virtual machines, define templates, and be an administrator to their own environment.

You need to buy support from red hat and you need to renew support every year in order to keep getting support from red hat. Some features are unavailable compared to leading visualization products. RHEV hyper-visor came later into the market than other leading visualization product.

RHEV hyper visor is a cost effective solution for virtualization. Its work on kernel base virtualization systems. Its usage keep growing in the market.

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.