RHEV Reviews

I have done some consulting where I used RHEV, taking on side jobs to run virtual machines in the financial industry for a startup.

The last time I used RHEV was in my home lab, but that has been deprecated for a long time. Red Hat does not really support it, and they want you to move everything to their commercial virtualization platform.

I never really stopped using RHEV from my lab's perspective and my own use.

In my opinion, the best features of RHEV are that it is a real hypervisor and it is free, so it performs better than VMware.

I have used the live migration feature in the past with RHEV. There is a free clone of it that is based on the open source. Live migration is a nifty feature if your app is not highly available and you need to do maintenance on a machine. You can migrate the VM off of it, do your maintenance, and move it back when you are done.

RHEV has a high availability architecture with a built-in monitoring feature where you could see machines other than the one you are operating on. I tend to implement high availability not so much in RHEV, but by using standard application high availability strategies. Red Hat has another product specifically for high availability.

RHEV is not improving because it has been discontinued. It has been discontinued for years.

I would love to get back into RHEV, but the job market is difficult and no one is hiring.

RHEV is designed to be on-premises and would not work in the cloud. It would not work in Amazon or Microsoft Azure because it uses an ARP setting to advertise a virtual IP for some of the high availability features, and neither of those platforms allow that. You have to use an API to change everything, so it does not work in the cloud.

I have dealt with RHEV since it existed. I cannot remember when that product was released.

RHEV setup is fairly straightforward. If you look at the manual for it, it tells you what all the options are as you are going through the setup. You could set up a basic two-node cluster in under an hour.

I do not currently deal with RHEV in my current role.

I suppose I could update my RHEV review.

Since I am the only one using RHEV, I have never really done a lot with that. I just give myself admin rights and go, so I am probably not the best person to ask about that.

You need to have a Red Hat background to operate RHEV.

I would love to work with OpenShift to get some experience, but it is not open source and it is not free. I cannot download it and play with it. It is a commercial product that you have to buy before you can touch it, and it is not cheap.

I would rate this review a 7.

Our main use cases for RHEV are that our legacy virtualization system became RHEV, which we use for the container environment, and we moved a lot of our workloads that were running on the VMware side.

The impact of RHEV on workload consolidation in our data center started first with separating Linux and Windows workloads in our environment. I don't know what percentage of savings we achieved with the Linux migrations, but I can say that 40% of the virtualization and other costs were eliminated from our legacy virtualization side. For the Windows side, we also initiated a digital transformation project, moving a lot of Windows applications to the container side and the open-source software side, which resulted in almost 70% savings of our past expenses.

We've gotten used to using Red Hat products for a long time, and the main advantage of using the same product and standardization brings some efficiency, along with cost optimization in our software and hardware environments, especially after VMware was acquired by Broadcom, which affected customers such as us. However, we haven't changed the pricing structure or lost any money against other things, so our systems are optimized, and we can say that we saved a lot of money.

The RHEV management plane could be improved, particularly the management interface. Something more similar to a Google, Amazon, or Azure interface might attract people to use its management interface, as I heard from our team that Red Hat has not changed the management interface in many years. They were expecting a VMware-like experience or a Microsoft management console experience from Red Hat.

We have been using Red Hat for almost 15 years, even before IBM acquired Red Hat.

The deployment experience has been straightforward. Nothing has changed as some playbooks and Ansible scripts provide enough ease of use for using Red Hat products.

Our technical team is installing those parts, and from their experiences, it's stable for us. We can follow up on all the versions and all the applications, so nothing has changed on our side.

We are not replacing any virtualization environment or adding capacity to the virtualization environment because OCS provides the same infrastructure and virtualization, along with container systems.

The technical support by Red Hat is great.

In general, I would rate their support a nine, though it depends on which part of the software stack is changing.

Positive

We are already working with Red Hat and some open-source solutions for our container management.

We are using Red Hat OpenShift, specifically OCS. We purchased it directly from Red Hat Turkey and Red Hat partners. We have been both a customer and partner of Red Hat.

We are using both RHEV and the OCS side, along with some small JBoss. Our technical team uses Red Hat Virtualization Manager for managing virtual machines and host systems. Our application team is working with JBoss ESB.

On a scale of 1-10, I would rate RHEV an 8.

I work within the large Red Hat ecosystem. I started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and continue to use it. I have begun utilizing their virtualization and VM technology, aiming to replace VMware. 

Additionally, I use their Syslog. Most of these are installed on Red Hat Linux, including Zabbix, Wazoo, and Keycloak. Wazoo is a SIM solution.

The biggest aspect for me is the disk usage, the virtual manager, and the deployment of machines. It has significantly improved in recent years. It used to be specialized, but now it is very similar to VMware.

My teammates and I often complain that VMware is well-documented and has a large community since it is the de facto standard. I would love to see better documentation and ease of use. 

For newcomers to KVM and Linux, the learning curve is steep. The available documentation is limited, so unless I am an expert and have been using Linux and these features for a long time, I will face difficulties. It is not straightforward.

I have used the solution for about 30 months.

I would rate the customer service five out of ten. It is a cult where most people go by word-of-mouth. They exchange information on WhatsApp and ask their friends. Many workarounds are still used, and people have gotten so accustomed to these workarounds that they forget they should not be part of the solution.

Neutral

I am currently using VMware. It has not become obsolete, but it has become too expensive. VMware was purchased by Broadcom, and they increased the licensing cost. That was the biggest driver and motivator for me to switch.

I would rate the initial setup three out of ten. When I set it up a year and a half ago, a lot had changed. It was not as straightforward as I desired. The documentation did not help at all. My excellent Linux administrators learned how to use it through trial and error and word-of-mouth. Setting it up was not easy.

I had a physical HPE server dedicated to KVM. I initialized the process of installing virtualization and then started my test environment on KVM. It was slow because it was a pilot technology. For example, once I installed Zabbix, my network monitoring solution, it ramped up quickly. With the confidence from Zabbix, I started installing other machines on KVM.

The only return on investment I see is the cost. 

It's the open source. There's not much cost. It's very minimal comparably. Compared to what I am paying for VMware, it's negligible.

I considered RHEV. That was it.

I advise keeping an open mind. It's an excellent solution. You have to know Linux pretty well. 

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

Pretty much the same use cases you'd use any of the competing products like VMware or a Microsoft solution. It's a virtualization platform.

I've deployed this at a couple of different places. It always comes down to cost and the ability to still adhere to your ITSM-type standards. I've benchmarked a lot of virtualization solutions, and RHEV is the fastest – it has the least amount of overhead. And it's cheap too.

It's just easy to use. You could do all of the core product features that you could do with VMware. You can move a VM from one machine to the other, and you have all the same disk options, like thin versus thick provisioning and the ability to emulate different processor types... the management's kind of the same. It's just the third-party support that's better for Microsoft and VMware. That's the biggest difference. 

The cons are that you have extensive third-party support for Microsoft and VMware platforms that don't exist in the Red Hat world. 

Red Hat has some partners, but if your company uses something that backs up VMware on a block level, for example, those backup products often won't have support for Red Hat. They might just say to back up all your VMs as if they were individual clients, which isn't as efficient, even though it still works.

The biggest improvement would be more third-party direct support for things like backups and provisioning through third-party portals. The framework is all there because the API is open and well-documented – that's what vendors who support VMware use. 

They could write their software to work against RHEV, but they're not investing in doing it for the Red Hat solution. 

So, that's the biggest difference between VMware and Red Hat. Microsoft's third-party support for Hyper-V is fairly decent.

I've been using it for about five years.

Reliability and uptime, in our experience with RHEV, are all based on Linux, and the next version of Linux will have that in-memory upgrade capability, so you can literally upgrade the kernel without rebooting. 

For now, it's similar to its competitors – if you're upgrading a machine, you just vMotion everything off of it, upgrade your one node, move them back, clear the next node, and so on. But in the very near future, you won't even have to do that. You'll be able to do the in-memory upgrade.

I haven't seen any major issues with stability. Ten being the best, I would rate Red Hat and VMware both at a nine and Microsoft at an eight.

The planning and sizing are similar to other platforms. We can make clusters of machines, just like with other platforms, and migrate to and from them –  do that vMotion-type thing. I haven't directly migrated a machine from one platform to the other, but I think they're all comparable. 

And then, as far as the management interface goes, that is similar to other products as well. You can think of the hypervisor manager as like vSphere and then manage all the hypervisor managers centrally from any workstation. So that's all very similar.

If I'm comparing it to its competitors, I'd say it's on par. It depends on how you define scalability. It's really how deep your wallet is.

So you can scale up easily.

The customer service and support are not as good as they used to be. They're about the same as everyone else – support gets shipped to India, and it's hard to talk to a real person. 

The only company that has ten out of ten in support of anything is IBM. Those guys have good support.

Positive

RHEV, in my testing, runs the fastest. But its Achilles heel is that third-party support isn't as strong, and there aren't as many products that integrate well with it.

You're more limited in what you can choose – not that the available options don't work well, but brand recognition isn't as strong. So, there are a lot of metrics, marketing, and other non-technical factors that drive people's decisions. People buy stuff because their competitors or neighbors are doing it.

The initial setup  is fairly straightforward and well-documented. The process is very similar to its competitors. The success of your setup depends on how well you plan. 

So, I could rate my experience with the initial setup for all of those a nine out of ten – all three of them (Microsoft, VMware, and RHEV) across the board have very good documentation on how to set everything up and execute it. 

Every platform requires maintenance because there are patches and bug fixes. I would say it depends on your security needs and how you plan around security and protect the hypervisor. Overall, I wouldn't have any major security concerns.

For me, the biggest ROI is in the pricing difference [compared to competitors]. But when I look at virtualization as a whole, the ROI is in the reduced number of machines needed to deploy, and the associated maintenance costs. 

Plus, it's really the ability to move a virtual machine around – this is true for all platforms. It makes things like upgrading the hardware easier because we're not redeploying bare metal apps from scratch. 

I just add new hardware to my cluster and slowly migrate the virtual machines over. So there's savings there, too, though it's kinda hard to calculate exactly what it is. 

But virtualization definitely helps lower all those costs.

It's a budget product as far as I'm concerned. It's way cheaper than any of its competitors. The only thing cheaper than Red Hat is that the people who take the Red Hat code clone it and then self-support it. 

Companies like Canonical and SUSE do the same thing – they sell similar products with a cheaper support model. Oracle, I think, is probably competitively priced with Red Hat because they use the same solution.

I love it. It's easy to use and manage, even at a large scale. I've worked with hundreds of virtual machines in the past, all managed from a single location. It's pretty good.

But it also depends on your needs. There may be legitimate reasons to go with an all-Microsoft solution, especially if you're an all-Microsoft shop.

Pricing, volume discounts, and what your team knows how to use all play a role. If your team doesn't know Unix very well, RHEV might not be the best fit because they won't be able to support it as well.

It's just a tool in the toolbox. You have to ask, 'Is this the right tool for me?' It may be for some people, but not for others. That's how I look at this.

If your team can support it, buy it for sure. It does virtualization really well. I like it. I even use the open-source version of it in my home lab.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten. The only reason I don't give it a ten is because of the third-party support.

The product has a good price. The major difference between RHEV and VMware is the price. RHEV’s cost is much less compared to VMware.

Management of RHEV is not as easy as VMware. Some features do not work. The product does not provide features similar to VMware’s VMotion. After creating the cluster, the VM is moved to another node if we move down. However, the VM does not move the parent node automatically. It has to be moved manually. VMware moves it automatically. RHEV moves it to the parent node only if we restart.

Everything can be handled in VMware through the GUI. However, in RHEV, some things can be managed through UI, and others cannot. We have to troubleshoot and use CLI. A few features of the product do not work as well as those in VMware.

I am working with RHEV currently.

The product is stable. I have deployed it for five to ten customers. There have been no issues. I rate the stability a six or seven out of ten.

The product is scalable. We can add many nodes to the cluster. There is no limit. We work with small and medium businesses.

The support is okay.

The deployment is not as easy as VMware. The time required for deployment depends on the setup. We face some issues that we need to troubleshoot and fix. However, VMware can be deployed smoothly without any issues if we follow the steps. We require more time to deploy RHEV compared to VMware. One engineer can deploy the tool. If we have skilled people, maintaining RHEV is easy.

It is an open-source solution. We do not need to pay the license cost if we install and manage the tool. We must purchase the license and support if we need a global patch. The subscription fee depends on the type of license we purchase. The license fee must be paid annually.

All enterprise customers use RHEV. All servers run on Linux. It is already the market leader. From a virtualization point of view, VMware is the market leader. It is easy to manage and troubleshoot VMware. It is better than RHEV. Overall, I rate the product a six or seven out of ten.

They use various application and database servers, including small Oracle databases, Postgres databases, and others supporting Java applications. They also use servers like Tomcat and Apache.

RHEV reduces the cost compared to VMware.

When you purchase RHEV, you are essentially buying a subscription license. This license can be integrated with various client types, including these integrations with the subscription.

We should improve how we manage storage domains and make more comprehensive control available through the command line. 

RHEV needs to consider those points that can be integrated. The REST API should have more control and features, which people typically use with Ruby and Python. This will allow us to manage those aspects more effectively through Python and Ruby.

RHEV needs to fix some bugs, which will take some time. The current version is 4.4, which is good, but it lacks the level of control that VMware provides.

I have been using RHEV for 11 years. Since we currently have different environments, I'll be using various versions.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

It is easy to scale. We have 13-14 medium and enterprise customers using this solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

Everything is smooth, and tracking is easy. The technical person managing this virtualization must know the Linux core. If someone doesn't know Linux, it can cause problems.

RHEV encompasses two main aspects. Everything is part of the RHEV suite. In a cluster setup, it handles host migrations and various settings. All these functionalities are bundled together.

Deployment takes a week to complete. RHEV is managed using the RHEV Manager. It is installed remotely on a separate machine, either physical or virtual. This machine must not be in a Linux system to avoid a single point of failure. Setting up RHEV involves creating data center clusters and adding hosts to these clusters. Each host can be designated for specific purposes, such as databases or applications. Thorough testing is required to ensure compliance with specifications before adding any lab or integrating RHEV. The integration process involves adding RHEV and checking the compatibility of the hardware and the host family. Typically, a standard setup includes three nodes or hosts per RHEV cluster. After the nodes are set up, the next step is building the VMs.

I rate the initial setup a ten out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

It should be more affordable and available. It should target companies, especially new ones, that need servers with capacities of around 518+ units. It should be priced appropriately because it might compromise quality if it's too cheap.

These solutions and tools we use daily are available to our customers. Our toolkit includes various tools, such as migrations, which are all valuable to our operations.

People often ask me about taking sessions on backups, configuration, and performance tuning. I usually advise them to follow best practices. If you don't have good knowledge, RHEV might require some time to learn and test scenarios in your lab environment before implementing it in production.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My company uses RHEV for the CRM tool we use.

With RHEV, the cyberattacks should be fewer. I want RHEV to be better protected.

I have been using RHEV for more than eight years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

Around 50 people in my company use RHEV.

Regarding RHEV, my company does not have plans to increase the number of users right now, but my company may consider doing so later on.

The initial setup of RHEV is straightforward.

RHEV's deployment process takes an hour to complete.

Two people are required for the maintenance and deployment of RHEV.

My company carried out RHEV's deployment process independently with the help of one of our in-house members.

Price-wise, RHEV is okay, in my opinion.

In the future, my company plans to switch to Hyper-V. My company plans to implement a CRM tool, and that's why we plan to switch to Hyper-V. You can switch to and make allocations easily with Hyper-V. Hyper-V is scalable, and my company has deployed it for a mid-sized organization, so I know that it is easy to manage while being available at a lucrative price.

I rate the overall tool a seven out of ten.

We use this solution to build privacy clouds for our clients.

We find the ease of use of this solution to be invaluable. It is user-friendly and integrates well with other software.

We would like the dashboard feature of this solution to be improved, as it is not very detailed at present.

We have been working with this product for around three years.

We have found this solution to be stable. However, if issues occur then we have found it quite complex to start the product working again.

We have found the solution to be easily scalable, as long as the correct server capacity is available.

We have found the technical support for this solution to be very slow in responding to our requests for assistance. There is also no automatic alert function, for if the solution stops working completely.

The initial setup of this solution is easy for basic use.  However, if there is a requirement for more advanced features, this will need to be carried out by someone with specific knowledge in how the product works.

The solution was implemented using a vendor team who, fortunately, were very knowledgeable about the process and the product.

This product has a variety of licensing options available. However, the level of licensing, and therefore the cost of licensing, is dependent on the number of servers being utilized.

We would advise organizations who are considering this solution, to ensure that their requirements are clearly defined, as this will impact the level of support needed with implementing and deploying the product.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

The high availability and live VM migration are the most useful aspects of the solution.

It's very difficult to deploy.

There is not any proper documentation on the site to reference. They need to really share more details and documents about the product. 

I've used the solution for eight to nine years. 

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches and t doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance is good. 

We have about 1,000 users on the solution currently.

We use the solution on a daily basis. 

I've never really tested the scalability.

While it takes some time, they do follow the problem and work to resolve it. 

Neutral

Other solutions, such as Oracle or IBM, are easier to deploy. The features of all are pretty similar. 

The initial setup is not simple or straightforward. It's very complex.

I'd rate the solution a one out of five in terms of ease of deployment. 

I'm not sure about the pricing. It's not an aspect I'm involved with. 

If someone is looking for server virtualization, VMware is a better choice. VMware is easy to deploy, easy to learn, and easy to manage. This solution is not. 

I'd rate the solution five out of ten.

The most valuable features of RHEV are all the tools, such as virtualization, management of cloud platforms, and integration of container environments. The solution has good compatibility between virtualization, content management, and cloud management. Having the full set of these tools is the advantage of it. 

It is preferred to have everything from the same vendor. This solution is one of the best and it includes automation and supports many virtualization layers. I prefer to propose this solution to customers unless they have a specific choice. 

RHEV can improve by keeping pace with new features and new enhancements. They should not be halted or delayed innovation because over the past quarter the enhancements have not been as fast as they have been previously. 

I have been using RHEV for approximately four years.

RHEV is a stable solution.

We have not had any issue with the implementation of RHEV.

We have a team that does the implementation and configuration of the solution. 

The price of RHEV is high. It is an open-source solution, the price should be less. The price should not be on par with a solution, such as VMware. It's not more or equal to VMware, it's less, but the difference should be more substantial.

If the price starts getting too high people will start going back to pure open source products. If the prices are the same as compared to VMware, then why would they use any Red Hat solution, such as RHEV. The features, robustness, and suitability for enterprise VMware has an edge over RHEV. The price should come down.

I have evaluated many other solutions, such as IBM OpenShift and VMware.

RHEV is a good solution and it's a stable product. When any organization needs end-to-end infrastructure deployment, configuration management, and automation, then RHEV is the best fit. The solution has all the best components in each of these areas from a competitive point of view. It is a benefit of having all the tools from one vendor, it make management easier.

There are many other solutions available, such as IBM OpenShift, but when comparing RHEV it is very good.

I rate RHEV an eight out of ten.