KVM Reviews

We are no longer using this solution. We evaluated it, but I have not used it in a production environment.

This solution is used for virtualization.

We have an on-premises deployment.

same features that vmware have concerning disaster recovery, high availibility and live motion of vm

simplicity of installation

full interoprability with vm format (ova, ovf, ..) for been aable to move forward or backward to another virtualization solution

We did not test scalability during our evaluation.

We are currently using VMware in our production environment.

The initial setup of this solution is quite simple.

My primary use case for KVM is running multiple VMs and containers on the one node.

I find the density of the product most valuable. It is because of kernel same page merging technology (KSM) that is integrated into Linux kernel. That high density makes KVM one of the important players of the virtualization market.

In the future release of KVM, I would like to have improved support for Windows guests.

The stability of this solution is less than other products in the same category. But, it is OK. 

The scalability of the product is really high because of architecture. Since KVM is part of a Linux kernel, it gets a lot of the benefits of its location. It has a nice strategy of memory virtualization, which is also part of the kernel. Kernel location makes possible schemes of a vhost that boosts device performance.

We currently have 300 users of KVM, with about two people as support staff. We do plan to increase usage in the future. So, we will be scaling up in the future.

The KVM technical support is really bad. It has a number of empty channels for support. We have tried emails, as well. But, if you are not part of the community, they will not answer your request. 

We previously used VMware. 

The initial setup was simple because KVM is used in Linux, so to get it out of the box is a simple task. But, the deployment is not an easy task. It takes a lot of installation suites. You could use a lot of additional products or improvements, like Red Hat virtualization that makes deployment of virtual machines simple. But, out of the box deployment is not that good.

This solution came with the Linux license.

Running virtualization clusters with more than 300 VMs.

The platform changes from hardware to virtualized whenever possible.

• Open source
• The ability to execute live migrations
• Linux, a base OS.

Management of underlying volumes.

Our primary use for this product is server virtualization.

There is a lot of value with an open source solution because you have some freedom of changing how the system behaves and looks because it's open source. You can modify to your requirements which you cannot really do with VMware.

The management of the whole system, could be improved. VMware is better on the management tools, for example, Red Hat is when it comes to the KVM.

In addition, we would like to have a software lifecycle solution included in this solution. We can handle the software needed for KVM, but also the software that we provide. A lifecycle component would be very beneficial.

It is a verty stable solution.

We have over 1000 users using the solution currently. 

If I were to rate the technical support on a scale of one to five, I would give it a four. We received good support and there is an on-site presence, as well. 

We previously used VMware but switched to KVM because it is an open ecosystem and we see there is a benefit in open source solutions.

It's very straightforward because there are a lot of examples of how to use it. 

It is cheaper than other solutions out there on the market.

We also evaluated Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical(Ubuntu), and other Linux providers.

The main use case is, of course, to run virtual machines. The specific use case is to run virtual network functions (VNFs) and the performance is very good on KVM.

A big strength with KVM is that it is an open-source component. It gets improvements from Intel, for example, and the other semiconductors. It can be sized-down to a very small package. It can be used in embedded systems as well, so it has a very good performance and it is suitable from embedded IT to big servers and supercomputers.

This solution integrates nicely with other soft-open-software components.

I would like to see a separation, so you could have KVM running in a few cores, and then you could have a real-time operating system running another core, so there is a hybrid environment with real time operating systems and Linux.

The stability is very good. It has not crashed once since we have been using it. 

I think nine out of the ten supercomputers in the world use Linux KVM, so I think that attests to the fact that it is a scalable product. It scales really well.

Technical support is not top-notch.

I think this solution is in need of an easier installation process.

It is cheaper than other competitors like VMware or Hyper-V.

We compared KVM vs VMware and did a proof-of-concept, but we decided that KVM was best suited for our needs when it came to device drivers, etc. We also considered Oracle and RedHat.

Great support for many types of hardware, disks, memory, RAID controllers, etc.

In the Linux world, KVM is a very reliable solution which can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with reasonable overhead. Reliable and extensible have a tight integration with Linux security facilities, like SELinux, KVM does the job.

You will unlikely see KVM if you are using a cloud solution because of it is a seamless integration. If instead you are a Linux desktop user, KVM is the solution to go with if you have to start virtual machines with Linux or other operating systems with almost zero extra configuration needed.

KVM has a rich options set which can be directly used or via wrappers, such as libvirt.

Our infrastructure is based on KVM and Linux Containers (LXC). We had a lot of VMware legacy, but it was converted to Ubuntu and KVM hypervisor for about the last year. Management and backup is a lot easier with with Ubuntu and KVM, especially combined with ZFS and snapshotting.

The support of virtualization in the recent generation of x86 processor is almost a must have, so the only negative aspect of needing hardware support is a fully functional KVM can be dropped. It would be nice if the support for other platforms, like ARM or Risk, were as good as the x86 one. However, with the democratization of Chromebooks based on these chips and mobile devices, it will not take long for that to happen.

It is free and can be run from your laptop, if needed, unlike VMware.

• Low cost, if not lowest.
• Great performance and scalability.
• Security is top-notch.
• Free.

Networking configuration might be annoying depending on how you want to set it up; usually works fine, though.

I have used it for one year.

We have not encountered any deployment issues.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Well, none.

Unless you can count open forums?

I previously used VMware VM VirtualBox and then Workstation Pro. I switched because VMware is not free.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I implemented it in-house.

Since I invested 0 dollars on KVM and just as much time as you would think is worth... you do the math.

KVM runs virtualized guests with its own kernel, which is very important to me.

I mainly use it for customer projects, as KVM allows running virtualized environments for free in a very efficient way. Furthermore, it is an open source solution so modifying the code is possible. One might think that this is never necessary for most projects; however, when a specific customer requested an enhancement of the functionality, I was able to provide that. The customer was very impressed that KVM is such a professional solution although it is free.

Over the years, many customers were happy that they were able to choose between VMware, Xen and another alternative - KVM.

Setting KVM up and running it with dozens of parameters can be annoying. However, there is a control interface called Virsh (and also a GUI called virt-manager) which allows running KVM guests with a simple config file.

I have been using KVM since 2010, so for fives years in total.

So far, no issues.

When running I/O intensive tasks, or having a very high amount of network packages which need to reach the guest(s). However, all issues were under control after tuning the config of the KVM guests.

No issues yet.

There is no customer service, only the community. It is a free product, based on open source software. However, one can use RHEV (the enterprise virtualization product from Red Hat), then you will be able to contact the Red Hat support.

I used Xen in the past and switched because the customers requested a solution which allows running a guest with its own Kernel. This is also possible with Xen, but not a common use case, though.

The initial setup, when done manually, is complex because you need to be an experienced Linux user or admin, especially as the networking part can be challenging.

I always deploy it on my own.

It is free! Use it and if you need enterprise support, make sure to use RHEV, the virtualization product from Red Hat.

No, because in the open source world, there are not many hypervisors which have the same feature set as KVM.

Make sure to gain a lot of knowledge about virtualization and the way KVM works. Then implement it with libvirt and virt-manager because this makes running KVM guests a lot easier.

It gives us live VM migrations.

It allows us to virtualize our entire IT Infrastructure without any software cost. We only need to spend money on support and deployment.

Used since 2009 from version 0.8, so 6 years now.

No.

No.

It's scaled for us since version 0.8.