RHEV is a great option as an open-source hypervisor!
February 29, 2016
RHEV is a great option as an open-source hypervisor!
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
RHEV is being used to implement an open-source hypervisor (KVM) with an easy-to-use front end for our customers. Our organization is exploring the feasibility of using it to deploy to multiple external locations in order to make management of VMs easy for remote administrators. It has a very well documented Python API, which makes automation easier to implement.
- Automation integration
- Migration of VMs from one physical host to another
- Support for open-source community projects, such as Gluster, Cinder, and Glance
- Product Q&A, regression testing, bug fix turnaround
- Standardization of deployment between the baseline products (e.g. stand-alone vs. appliance should support same configuration options)
- Improve WebUI navigation
- Reduced COTS costs to our organization due to the fact that it is open-source and has a freely available version (oVirt)
- It has helped to bring technology quickly to our operational locations due to the ability to quickly automate and deploy it
- It has enabled increased security to our enterprise due to the fact that it supports SELinux and allows us to customize the security posture of the infrastructure more easily
VMware ESXi is a more mature technology, as it has been around for a longer period of time. However, automating ESXi installations requires hacking OEM media and an intense amount of knowledge of how ESXi operates under the hood. The WebUI and associated functionality for ESXi is more stable than RHEV, however ESXi does not support open-source community projects such as Gluster, Cinder, or Glance natively and relies on HW RAID, NAS, or SAN to achieve high availability. Additionally ESXi licenses tend to be more expensive than using RHEV or it's freely available sibling oVirt.