Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

19 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
KVM	Score9.4 out of 10	N/A	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a virtualization solution developed by small Israeli software company Qumranet and supported by Red Hat since that company's acquisition in 2008.	N/A

Pricing

KVM

No answers on this topic

Pricing Offerings
KVM
Free Trial
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No

No setup fee

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Community Pulse
Key User Insights
	KVM
Considered Both Products	Red Hat Verified User Chose KVM We've found KVM to be less problematic, both from a stabilty standpoint, but also in a flexibility and licensing standpoint. We love being able to deploy the hardware we want, as we want it, without needing the blessing of a specific vendor. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose KVM Kernel-based Virtual Machine is an open-source and free solution, compared to Virtualbox which is a product from Oracle. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose KVM The key points why I made my decision for KVM in comparison with VMWare are: Freeware software (I am using an Ubuntu server OS), Fewer resources usage, vSwitch using that provides the ability to configure dot1q trunks to/between VMs, Stability, and simplicity of … Incentivized Helpful? Robert Munteanu Software Engineer in Engineering at LMN (Computer Software, 1-10 employees) Chose KVM Compared to VirtualBox, KVM has simpler licensing terms and is supported by the operating system vendor. KVM also has more mature integrations with other open-source projects. Automating provisioning is simple with KVM since it is available in the package repositories of … Incentivized Helpful? Valentin Höbel Senior Consultant IT Infrastructure in Human Resources at open *i GmbH (Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees) Chose KVM KVM is free and provides environments where guests can run their own Kernel while still performing very well. It is also very native to work with KVM since it is integrated within the Linux Kernel. Incentivized Helpful? Stenio Pereira Filho IT Group manager in Information Technology at University of Sao Paulo (Education Management, 10,001+ employees) Chose KVM It is a very reliable solution that can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with low overhead. It is a free and open source software. Easy to use withOpenStack. Incentivized Helpful?
	Would buy again
	No answers on this topic
	Delivers good value for the price
	No answers on this topic
	Happy with the feature set
	No answers on this topic
	Lived up to sales and marketing promises
	No answers on this topic
	Implementation went as expected
No answers on this topic

Features

KVM

Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Feature	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) 9.2 6 Ratings 13% above category average
Virtual machine automated provisioning	7.05 Ratings
Management console	10.04 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup	10.04 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration	10.05 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security	9.04 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	KVM
Small Businesses	Proxmox VE Score9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	VMware vSOM (discontinued) Score10 out of 10
Enterprises	IBM PowerVM Score9.6 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	KVM
Likelihood to Recommend	10.0 (6 ratings)
Usability	10.0 (1 ratings)

User Testimonials
	KVM
Likelihood to Recommend	Red Hat KVM is the best solution in the case you need to test and turn up any virtual environment with limited vCPU/RAM resources. The obvious area of its use is a network environment when we want to avoid being tied to one type of hardware/vendor and being able to swap from one instance to another with no downtimes. The use of a vSwitch (that supports VLAN tagging) is a significant bonus for network engineers that some other hypervisors do not provide. Incentivized Verified User Read full review
Pros	Red Hat KVM is really good at providing fast and reliable virtualization for Linux guests Since KVM is a kernel module, every VM is a Linux process which can be managed by Linux system tools KVM integrates very well with the management framework libvirt, which is why KVM can be integrated in automation tools as well Incentivized Valentin Höbel Senior Consultant IT Infrastructure Read full review
Cons	Red Hat KVM itself doesn't ship with a management interface KVM itself is a bit complicated to handle KVM needs Qemu to virtualize Windows guests Incentivized Valentin Höbel Senior Consultant IT Infrastructure Read full review
Usability	Red Hat It does the job and stays out of the way. The specifics of usability relies on the implementation, but with things like Icarus and libvirt, things are standardizing nicely. Incentivized Verified User Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Red Hat It is a very reliable solution that can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with low overhead. It is a free and open source software. Easy to use withOpenStack. Incentivized Stenio Pereira Filho IT Group manager Read full review
Return on Investment	Red Hat Fast provisioning of new servers. Huge drop of the cost of servers compared to bare metal. Easy upgrades of resources, sometimes now even requiring a server restart. Incentivized Verified User Read full review
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