Hyper-V vs. Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Hyper-V
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
N/A
$24.95
per month
KVM
Score 7.6 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
Hyper-VKernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Editions & Modules
Developer
$24.95
per month
Bronze
$49.00
per month
Silver
$89.00
per month
Gold
$135.00
per month
Platinum
$199.00
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Hyper-VKVM
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Hyper-VKernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Considered Both Products
Hyper-V
Chose Hyper-V
While Hyper-V did stack better for our needs than Proxmox VE or KVM, it did not offer the features that ESXi did for our needs and we had to forgo choosing Hyper-V for the promiscuous mode needs.
KVM

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Hyper-VKernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
Hyper-V
8.5
70 Ratings
2% above category average
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
9.2
5 Ratings
10% above category average
Virtual machine automated provisioning8.958 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Management console6.970 Ratings9.03 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup9.462 Ratings9.73 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration8.465 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security8.865 Ratings9.53 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Hyper-VKernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Small Businesses
Proxmox VE
Proxmox VE
Score 9.3 out of 10
Proxmox VE
Proxmox VE
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Hyper-VKernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(71 ratings)
9.3
(5 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.5
(16 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
5.0
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Hyper-VKernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
If budgets are stretched, Hyper-V is a very cost effective solution. Any veteran MS Windows administrators will have little issue in getting to grips with this. If you are familiar with VMware solutions, then you may find Hyper-V a little frustrating as it does lack some of the functionality of those products, however nothing that will prevent you from managing your virtual workloads and estate. Since rolling out Hyper-V 2019 we have had no real issues with it; ESXi seemed to have more issues and was less forgiving with hardware compatibility.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Pros
Microsoft
  • Easy to use GUI - very easy for someone with sufficient Windows experience - not necessarily a system administrator.
  • Provisioning VMs with different OSes - we mostly rely on different flavors of Windows Server, but having a few *nix distributions was not that difficult.
  • Managing virtual networks - we usually have 1 or 2 VLANs for our business purposes, but we are happy with the outcomes.
Read full review
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
Read full review
Cons
Microsoft
  • The only issue I have with Hyper-V is I am unable to use Veeam on my Windows 2016 Server to backup my FreeBSD HAProxy VM.
  • There is some sort of checkpoint issue that I have been unable to figure out, but it works just fine on my Windows 2012 Servers. I do believe this is a Microsoft issue and not a Veeam issue though.
  • Another thing that could be useful that Hyper-V does not have would be some sort of GUI that shows the status of all the VM's on a given server to help us manage them easier and know what is going on. However, I do have Zabbix for this and that does a good job at monitoring all my servers.
Read full review
Red Hat
  • Complex networking
  • GPU processing is not fully supported
  • It's hard to set up without support tools
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
Cheap and easy is the name of the game. It has great support, it doesn't require additional licenses, it works the same if it is a cluster or stand-alone, and all the servers can be centrally managed from a system center virtual machine manager server, even when located at remote sites.
Read full review
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Usability
Microsoft
It is very easy to configure new virtual machines and manage them. But you have to use different interfaces to perform various tasks. Especially as soon as it comes to clustering you have to use at least two different interfaces (Hyper-V Manager and Failover-Cluster Manager) to perform all necessary tasks. The newly released Windows Admin Center is a way into the right direction to get all management tasks into one single interface.
Read full review
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
Microsoft
In the past 2 years our Hyper-V servers have only had a handful of instances where the VM's on them were unreachable and the physical Hyper-V server had to be restarted. One time this was due to a RAM issue with the physical box and was resolved when we stopped using dynamic memory in Hyper-V. The other times were after updates were installed and the physical box was not restarted after the updates were installed.
Read full review
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Performance
Microsoft
Hyper-V itself works quickly and rarely gave performance issues but this can be more attributed to the physical server specifications that the actual Hyper-V software in my opinion as Hyper-V technically just utilizes config files such as xml, and a data drive file (VHD, VHDX, etc) to perform its' duties.
Read full review
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Microsoft
Hyper-V is greatly supported by techs around the world. There are tons of forums, help websites and individuals ready to answer questions. I've never needed to contact Microsoft for help...because help is so easy to find out there. Do a search online for anything related to Hyper-V and you will certainly find an article with spelled out steps on how to do what you are looking to do.
Read full review
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
In-Person Training
Microsoft
We had in person training from a third party and while it was very in depth it was at a beginner's level and by the time we received the training we had advanced past this level so it was monotonous and redundant at that point. It was good training though and would have provided a solid foundation for learning the rest of Hyper-V had I had it from the beginning.
Read full review
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Microsoft
The training was easy to read and find. There were good examples in the training and it is plentiful if you use third party resources also. It is not perfect as sometimes you may have a specific question and have to spend time learning or in the rare case you get an error you might have to research that error code which could have multiple causes.
Read full review
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Microsoft
initial configuration of hyper-v is intuitive to anyone familiar with windows and roles for basic items like single server deployments, storage and basic networking. the majority of the problems were with implementing advanced features like high availability and more complex networking. There is a lot of documentation on how to do it but it is not seamless, even to experienced virtualization professionals.
Read full review
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
VMware is the pioneer of virtualization but when you compare it with Hyper-V, VMware lacks the flexibility of hardware customization and configuration options Hyper-V has also GPU virtualization still not adequate for both platforms. VMware has better graphical interface and control options for virtual machines. Another advantage VMware has is it does not need a dedicated os GUI base installation only needs small resources and can easily install on any host.
Read full review
Red Hat
Kernel-based Virtual Machine is an open-source and free solution, compared to Virtualbox which is a product from Oracle.
Read full review
Scalability
Microsoft
Nothing is perfect but Hyper-V does a great job of showing the necessary data to users to ensure that there is enough resources to perform essential functions. You can also select what fields show on the management console which is helpful for a quick glance. There are notifications that can be set up and if things go unnoticed and a Hyper-V server runs out of a resource it will safely and quickly shut down the VM's it needs to in order to ensure no Hardware failure or unnecessary data loss.
Read full review
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • Hyper-V has provided for an extremely cost-effective virtual environment with disaster recovery. For the size of our business, it's all we need to ensure our desired level of continuity of services and protection against hardware failures.
  • Since we are a Windows shop, deploying Hyper-V means we don't have the added cost of a hypervisor, since it's included in the cost of the Windows Server license. It's all we needed to achieve our goal of running all our virtual machines on a single server with another, less expensive server on tap for replication and failover.
  • We wanted easy deployment and management with disaster recovery while having the ability to leverage our years of Windows SysAdmin experience. Hyper-V fit the bill.
Read full review
Red Hat
  • KVM just works and gets out of the way
  • KVM is working great with other open-source technologies like QEMU and libvirt
Read full review
ScreenShots