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

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
KVM
Score 9.1 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 9.1 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.N/A
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
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.
Chose KVM
Kernel-based Virtual Machine is an open-source and free solution, compared to Virtualbox which is a product from Oracle.
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 …
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 …
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.
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.
Red Hat OpenShift
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat maintains a consistent user interface across their products, and their feature sets facilitate easy and rapid adoption. Configuration as code is the optimal approach for all of them, and they all provide a level of command-line access that ensures teams can work in the …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Cost effective and does they job at a cheaper price point and better. Highly recommend swapping off of VMware ESXI. Especially with the price point.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
More complex but more features
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
OCP and OpenShift Virtualization are better for a code based infrastructure our organization is attempting to move towards shortly. VMware has also been acquired which has added instability with their future. We are planning to move all VMware workloads to OpenShift …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
I don't have as much experience with the other two, I have heard of them and know they are container management systems. I have the most experience with Red Hat OpenShift.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
only used for Virt. Red Hat OpenShift has more offerings
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat Data Grid, Red Hat Integration, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
As a specialized partner in container platform Red Hat OpenShift is our preffered solution. It provides a supported kubernetes platform which contains all the required tools to make the life of customers easier and offer them the same experience accross all hyperscalers, …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
I find OpenShift opinionated but also requiring less configuration to be functional than the other platforms that I've mentioned, and Tanzu requires Faustian contracts to be signed.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
K3s Lightweight Kubernetes and Canonical Enterprise Kubernetes
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
In my experience, Red Hat OpenShift is Much much easier to provision
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
Ratings
13% above category average
Red Hat OpenShift
-
Ratings
Virtual machine automated provisioning7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Management console10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security9.00 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
8.4
Ratings
8% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings9.30 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings7.90 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)Red Hat OpenShift
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Score 9.6 out of 10
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Score 8.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
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Score 10.0 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
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Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 10.0 out of 10
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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
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.2
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.5
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
5.5
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
6.9
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)Red Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
Kernel-based Virtual Machine is very well suited when one needs a single-node virtualization host or needs to build a complex demo setting on their own notebook (e.g. when demonstrating solutions to a customer).
Read full review
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
  • Lightweight built-in implementation for all *nix based OS.
  • Easy to deploy and manage VMs.
  • Freeware (is you are using a free OS).
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  • One of the big advantages of Red Hat OpenShift is, especially over Kubernetes itself, is that it provides a lot of built-in operators for doing a lot of different things right out of the box that you don't have to worry about trying to configure. So one of the big ones is, I mean, right in your face is that user interface and being able to work with it inside of a browser. And I think that works very, very well.
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Cons
  • 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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  • I would say that's the logging part because Red Hat OpenShift write tons of locks and if most time in the finance industry, we cannot use the built in logging infrastructure for compliance reasons. And we have to forward the logs out of the system and this is, it's too much, which we forward from one cluster. Most time we'll build up multi clusters, so we speak about 10 or more clusters. And if you send log files from 10 or more clusters, the logging systems are not prepared to take that much load. And then really often you have license problems with the logging system, so that's not really, really fun. So logging could be improved.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
Going to stay with this platform for the unforeseeable future. It matches our Target Architecture 2030 strategy internally to adopt more modularized platforms with Open Source on the back-end so that if needed containerized workloads can move to a different platform. With open-source based application telemetry collection being utilized on the back-end, integrating our already existing oTeL observability based platform makes it easier for our apps to be monitored
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Usability
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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As I said before, the obserability is one of the weakest point of OpenShift and that has a lot to do with usability. The Kibana console is not fully integrated with OpenShift console and you have to switch from tab to tab to use it. Same with Prometheus, Jaeger and Grafan, it's a "simple" integration but if you want to do complex queries or dashboards you have to go to the specific console
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
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
No answers on this topic
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
No answers on this topic
Their customer support team is good and quick to respond. On a couple of occassions, they have helped us in solving some issues which we were finding a tad difficult to comprehend. On a rare occasion, the response was a bit slow but maybe it was because of the festival season. Overall a good experience on this front.
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In-Person Training
No answers on this topic
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
No answers on this topic
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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Alternatives Considered
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 using/troubleshooting, Well-known interface (for Linux geeks).
Read full review
We utilized the Thycotic Secret Service to manage all our application secrets, resulting in seamless integration with our applications. We developed all the applications using Red Hat Fuse (currently migrated to Quarkus). We used the built-in Kali Linux support of OpenShift to manage and configure the services and API. Additionally, the Red Hat Developer Studio facilitates faster development.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
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
  • Capital expenditure costs are low, because is open-source and free
  • Operational expenditure costs are medium because it's necessary [to have] an IT team with experience in Linux
  • First step to the virtualization world. Wake up, we are in the 21st century
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  • When you talk about ROIs, I don't have any negative impacts I wanted to call out here. There is no negative impacts. In fact, it's all positive impacts what we set as our milestones towards achieving our goals, towards achieving our greater vision. Red Hat OpenShift has got a big role in it and it is certainly helping us.
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ScreenShots