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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Hyper-V

    Score8.6 out of 10
    N/AN/A

    $24.95

    per month

    KVM

    Score2.1 out of 10
    N/AKernel-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-VKVM
    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-VKVM
    Considered Both Products
    Microsoft
    Chose Hyper-V
    Hyper-v has been the most consistent across disparate host hardware.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Red Hat
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    94%
    Would buy again
    31 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    32 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    94%
    Happy with the feature set
    31 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    25 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    97%
    Implementation went as expected
    30 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Hyper-VKVM
    Server Virtualization
    Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Hyper-V and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
    Feature
    Hyper-V
    8.6
    71 Ratings
    5% above category average
    Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
    9.2
    5 Ratings
    12% above category average
    Virtual machine automated provisioning9.059 Ratings9.04 Ratings
    Management console7.071 Ratings9.03 Ratings
    Live virtual machine backup9.063 Ratings9.73 Ratings
    Live virtual machine migration8.565 Ratings9.04 Ratings
    Hypervisor-level security9.465 Ratings9.53 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Hyper-VKVM
    Small Businesses
    Proxmox VE
    Score9 out of 10
    Proxmox VE
    Score9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    VMware vSOM (discontinued)
    Score10 out of 10
    VMware vSOM (discontinued)
    Score10 out of 10
    Enterprises
    VMware Workstation Pro
    Score8.2 out of 10
    VMware Workstation Pro
    Score8.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Hyper-VKVM
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (72 ratings)
    9.3
    (5 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.0
    (6 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (8 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-VKVM
    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.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    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
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    • KVM itself doesn't ship with a management interface
    • KVM itself is a bit complicated to handle
    • KVM needs Qemu to virtualize Windows guests
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    It does the job and stays out of the way. The specifics of usability relies on the implementation, but with things like Icarus and libvirt, things are standardizing nicely.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    It is a very reliable solution that can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with low overhead. It is a free and open source software. Easy to use withOpenStack.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    • Fast provisioning of new servers.
    • Huge drop of the cost of servers compared to bare metal.
    • Easy upgrades of resources, sometimes now even requiring a server restart.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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