KVM-based Hypervisor vs Hyper-V vs VMware

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srothman

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Cost aside, how does KVM compare to the "big names" as far as server virtualization is concerned, specifically the other two mentioned?

I don't have any experience with it (hence the question), although, from what I read, nobody really considers is an enterprise-grade hypervisor, with everyone gravitating towards the other two (and Xen, to a certain extent).

Thoughts?
 
I tested them a little then bought a VMware licence and never looked back since.
 
:D

I am dead sure someone else who actually works with this stuff is busy writing a review for you as we type.

Just hang in here.
 
KVM is very fast & very stable. VMware is good but ridiculously overpriced.

You mention that nobody considers KVM to be an enterprise grade HV... a company like Digital Ocean can't be wrong.
 
ChalkCheese said:
KVM is very fast & very stable. VMware is good but ridiculously overpriced.

You mention that nobody considers KVM to be an enterprise grade HV... a company like Digital Ocean can't be wrong.
Click to expand...

Spot on... All comes down to price. Far as I remember KVM is up to 10% quicker depending on the environment installed
 
I make use of KVM in production sites and have use VMWare at a previous site. I have used Hyper-V but more in a client usage than administration of said environment.

The tooling around VMWare and Hyper-V is more advanced than around KVM, but not substantially lacking.

Speed wise, setting up and managing the virtual machines appear easier in KVM than in VMWare especially for remote servers on slow connections.

For me it comes down to Linux management tools vs Windows management tools.
 
It depends on what you want to do with your virtualization.


If you are in the enterprise market and doing in house enterprise private cloud for your SAP or Oracle solutions and such, then I would recommend VMWare. It's toolset it perfectly positioned for the enterprise market. I however would never ever use VMware in the public cloud hosting market, it's cumbersome and not really well suited for it. Also the licensing is insane.

Hyper-V is ok, I've never really been very impressed with it, but it seems to do the job. However in saying that, I think Azure Cloud uses it successfully. I would imagine for Windows based VM's, Hyper-V would be the best choice.

Xen - Xen is great in the enterprise and the mass cloud hosting market. It gets the job done, is mature and is rock solid.
It's the defacto Hypervisor for Amazon Cloud and Rackspace Cloud. However I am not sure if this is simply because at the time of launching their cloud, Xen was the best choice. It doesn't necessarily mean it's the best choice now, but it certainly was 3/4 years ago.

KVM - is the newcomer to the market, is built from the ground up and is part of the actual linux kernel.
Red Hat has pumped a ton of development into it and KVM is fast becoming the new defecto in cloud hosting. Digital Ocean, CloudSigma and other large amount of public clouds now run on KVM or are moving towards KVM. It's far simpler to tweak and build on than Xen. In the last 2 years there has been massive growth towards KVM and is the hypervisor of choice for OpenStack. It is rock solid and performance is great. We use KVM as our public cloud hypervisor of choice.


At the end of the day it depends on what your virtualization requirements are.
Here at Domains.co.za, we run a mix of XenServer and KVM, depending on the virtualization requirements of the solution.

Dave @ Domains.co.za
 
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Thanks for the extensive replies, all. We are currently a Hyper-V house, and utilize an MS private cloud extended into Azure.

Our ERP system has certain Linux-based components that we now want to test on KVM as the HV as opposed to Hyper-V.

We won't be moving away from Hyper-V any time soon, and it's working really well, although, we are by no means anti-other, and KVM has been mentioned as a possible platform, specifically for our Linux workloads.
 
srothman said:
Our ERP system has certain Linux-based components that we now want to test on KVM as the HV as opposed to Hyper-V.

We won't be moving away from Hyper-V any time soon, and it's working really well, although, we are by no means anti-other, and KVM has been mentioned as a possible platform, specifically for our Linux workloads.
Click to expand...

In that case I would recommend using XenServer and manage it through the XenCenter Management Console (and install the Xen tools on the VM once you have set it up).
http://xenserver.org/overview-xenserver-open-source-virtualization/download.html
 
Look into Proxmox VE. It's free but they do offer inexpensive subscriptions for verified repositories, or if you need support.

It's a set of management tools for KVM and a few other related technologies. It's by far the easiest way to get started with KVM

My personal experience is that it's technically superior for hosting Linux VM and gets very close to Hyper-V for Windows hosting.

It's main performance advantage seems to be directly attached storage and network throughput. In benchmarking, I found that you lose less than 3% compared to native.

Did I mention that it also has a built-in backup application.
 
SauRoNZA said:
Another vote for Proxmox here.
Click to expand...

We're the Promox partner in South Africa, and while my opinion is not swayed whatsoever because of that. Its really not a bad product.

We have clients across the board in government, hosting, enterprise, SME ... you name it.

While it certainly does not have all the bells and whistles other brands like VMWare have, nor the market support for 3rd party software, it is really not a bad product and certainly worth trying out. Most of what a typical organization requires is easily achieved.
 
Well I switched a whole environment from VMWare to Proxmox so that should say a lot.

Largely because VMWare just want to keep charging for new versions an per CPU.

But also because of the built-in backup solutions inside Proxmox.
 
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