Canonical OpenStack vs. Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

Ubuntu OpenStack is well suited for startups where there are very tight financial constraints. As Ubuntu OpenStack is open source, the startup organizations will not have to spend a lot when compared to their commercial offerings in the market. Ubuntu OpenStack is less appropriate in organizations where they don't want to have private on-prem clouds. As deploying a private on-prem cloud is a very cumbersome and tedious task, the organizations must have a dedicated team to manage such on-prem deployments.

Incentivized

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

• Very easy to use, learning curve is very short. Don't need to invest months of training before using it
• Well suited with Jenkins for automated tests
• Works well on large sets of heterogeneous hardware

• 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

• More customizable options while choosing virtual machine configurations would be great.
• To have regular online learning sessions directly from Ubuntu OpenStack experts [to] help users and for those who implement it.
• Giving admin more control on what privileges they can grant to their users.

Incentivized

• Complex networking
• GPU processing is not fully supported
• It's hard to set up without support tools

Incentivized

Everybody knows VMWare which is the world's number one in data center infrastructure management. OpenStack is lot lot less expensive but doesn't offer all the functionalities you have with VMWare especially for High Availability and load balancing. You should go for OpenStack if you need an easy to use solution without the need for external consultants. If you don't have the capacity to manage your own infrastructure you had better go for VMWare.

Kernel-based Virtual Machine is an open-source and free solution, compared to Virtualbox which is a product from Oracle.

Incentivized

• Lighter on initial spending for the organization.
• Deployments which have no vendor locking makes management decisions easier.
• Support from great community saved lot of time for engineers managing it.

Incentivized

• KVM just works and gets out of the way
• KVM is working great with other open-source technologies like QEMU and libvirt

Incentivized