Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) vs. Red Hat OpenShift

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
KVM
Score 8.0 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
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.
$0.08
per hour
Pricing
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)Red Hat OpenShift
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
KVMRed Hat OpenShift
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)Red Hat OpenShift
Considered Both Products
KVM

No answer on this topic

Red Hat OpenShift
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
There is no differential choice, the two products fulfill very different functions within the Company, since one is a platform as a service and the other is an infrastructure as a service, and it is a consumption at the choice of the clients.

no existe una eleccion diferencial, …
Features
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)Red Hat OpenShift
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
9.2
6 Ratings
14% above category average
Red Hat OpenShift
-
Ratings
Virtual machine automated provisioning7.05 Ratings00 Ratings
Management console10.04 Ratings00 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup10.04 Ratings00 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration10.05 Ratings00 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security9.04 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
-
Ratings
Red Hat OpenShift
8.2
279 Ratings
5% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings8.1241 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings9.0267 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings7.8249 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings7.8227 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings8.3251 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings8.1236 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings8.5244 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings8.4231 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings7.8244 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings7.6241 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings8.3244 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)Red Hat OpenShift
Small Businesses
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 9.4 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
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User Ratings
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)Red Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(6 ratings)
9.1
(270 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(27 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.3
(13 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
5.5
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(131 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
6.8
(10 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
6.7
(4 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)Red Hat OpenShift
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.
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Red Hat
Red Hat OpenShift, despite its complexity and overhead, remains the most complete and enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform available. It excels in research projects like ours, where we need robust CI/CD, GPU scheduling, and tight integration with tools like Jupyter, OpenDataHub, and Quiskit. Its security, scalability, and operator ecosystem make it ideal for experimental and production-grade AI workloads. However, for simpler general hosting tasks—such as serving static websites or lightweight backend services—we find traditional VMs, Docker, or LXD more practical and resource-efficient. Red Hat OpenShift shines in complex, container-native workflows, but can be overkill for basic infrastructure needs.
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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
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Red Hat
  • We had a few microservices that dealt with notifications and alerts. We used OpenShift to deploy these microservices, which handle and deliver notifications using publish-subscribe models.
  • We had to expose an API to consumers via MTLS, which was implemented using Server secret integration in OpenShift. We were then able to deploy the APIs on OpenShift with API security.
  • We integrated Splunk with OpenShift to view the logs of our applications and gain real-time insights into usage, as well as provide high availability.
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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
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Red Hat
  • OpenShift virtualization has a little room for improvement. I'm coming from it as a Rev customer. There's some things in that OpenShift virtualization that were in Rev that I would like to see in OpenShift virtualization. I realized that they're chasing the VMware crowd and that's fine, but from us old Rev customers, we'd like to see some things that was in Rev around via migration and things of that nature that could be in OpenShift virtualization, I hope is being planned to be put in.
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Likelihood to Renew
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
OpenShift is really easy of use through its management console. OpenShift gives a very large flexibility through many inbuilt functionalities, all gathered in the same place (it's a very convenient tool to learn DevOps technics hands on) OpenShift is an ideal integrated development / deployment platform for containers
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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.
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Red Hat
The virtualization part takes some getting used to it you are coming from a more traditional hypervisor. Customization options are not intuitive to these users. The process should be more clear. Perhaps a guide to Openshift Virtualization for users of RHV, VMware, etc. would ease this transition into the new platform
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Reliability and Availability
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
Redhat openshift is generally reliable and available platform, it ensures high availability for most the situations. in fact the product where we put openshift in a box, we ensure that the availability is also happening at node and network level and also at storage level, so some of the factors that are outside of Openshift realm are also working in HA manner.
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Performance
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
Overall, this platform is beneficial. The only downsides we have encountered have been with pods that occasionally hang. This results in resources being dedicated to dead or zombie pods. Over time, these wasted resources occasionally cause us issues, and we have had difficulty monitoring these pods. However, this issue does not overshadow the benefits we get from Openshift.
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Support Rating
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
Every time we need to get support all the Red Hat team move forward looking to solve the problem. Sometimes this was not easy and requires the scalation to product team, and we always get a response. Most of the minor issues were solved with the information from access.redhat.com
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In-Person Training
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
I was not involved in the in person training, so i
can not answer this question, but the team in my org worked directly
with Openshift and able to get the in person training done easily, i did not
hear problem or complain in this space, so i hope things happen
seamlessly without any issue.
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Online Training
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
We went thru the training material on RH webesite, i think its very descriptive and the handson lab sesssions are very useful. It would be good to create more short duration videos covering one single aspect of openshift, this wll keep the interest and also it breaks down the complexity to reasonable chunks.
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Implementation Rating
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
The learning curve is quite high but worth it.
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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.
Read full review
Red Hat
The Tanzu Platform seemed overly complicated, and the frequent changes to the portfolio as well as the messaging made us uneasy. We also decided it would not be wise to tie our application platform to a specific infrastructure provider, as Tanzu cannot be deployed on anything other than vSphere. SUSE Rancher seemed good overall, but ultimately felt closer to a DIY approach versus the comprehensive package that Red Hat OpenShift provides.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
It's easy to understand what are being billed and what's included in each type of subscription. Same with the support (Std or Premium) you know exactly what to expect when you need to use it. The "core" unit approach on the subscription made really simple to scale and carry the workloads from one site to another.
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Scalability
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
This is a great platform to deployment container applications designed for multiple use cases. Its reasonably scalable platform, that can host multiple instances of applications, which can seamlessly handle the node and pod failure, if they are configured properly. There should be some scalability best practices guide would be very useful
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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.
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Red Hat
  • All of the above. Red Hat OpenShift going into a developer-type setting can be stood up very quickly. There's a very short period to have developers onboard to it and they're able to become productive much faster than a grow your own type solution.
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ScreenShots