Red Hat Virtualization vs. SUSE Harvester

Red Hat Virtualization is suitable for small implementation and hosting VMs. However, when you start asking for additional features or enhancements, the engineering team is not the flexible as other engineering teams in Red Hat. It is very likely they will not accept adding features or in the best case. They wouldn't commit to a plan when it is possible to be available.

Incentivized

It's great for provisioning any kind of virtual servers, but for now, we use it to provision only servers for Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters. But we are considering to provision also virtual servers for all kinds of needs on SUSE Harvester in the near future, as it's getting more and more mature with every release.

• RHV issues/bugs can be reported via Bugzilla to RH support. The service is great and typically responds soon.
• Red Hat distribution integration is seamless as it is integrated into the kernel.
• OpenStack support enables more customized VM templates and network configuration control.

Incentivized

• Fast to deploy new virtual machines
• It's easy to use
• Stable and ready for production
• Free and open source
• Has a strong community

• Documentation of RHEV needs more improvement.
• RHEV GUI needs a lot of improvements in some versions of RHEV, GUI will not work properly (shows incorrect details of VM ).
• Need fast rollout of patch releases.
• Need good linux Knowledge to manage the RHEVM.

Incentivized

• It takes expertise to set up SUSE Harvester for production
• You need to get used to SUSE Harvester to be as "fluent" as in VMWare ESXi
• You need to well prepare for system upgrades

Red Hat Virtualization is the best enterprise-level virtualization software for an organization that needs cost-effective and flexible solutions for its environment. We can easily integrate RHEV with other Red Hat software like OpenStack...etc. RHEV is highly customizable software, which helps us to customize our environment. Since RHEV is an open-source tool, we can install it on any hardware. There is no proprietary dependency.

Incentivized

We used ESXi for years and were happy with it. Then we implemented Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters with nodes provisioned on VMware ESXi. Later, when SUSE Harvester came out, we started to provision SUSE Rancher nodes on Harvester. Both VMware ESXi and SUSE Harvester are great products, and I think - we are keeping both, at least for now, when SUSE Harvester is a young project.

• It has had an extremely positive impact on my overall business and has allowed me to utilize and leverage it as an offering to my clients.
• It's an extremely solid, robust, and reliable product built off of KVM Virtualization technology.
• Less expensive solution than VMware and includes more features!

Incentivized

• We can provision more virtual servers
• It's cheaper than competitor products (tbh - it's free, if you don't need support)
• It's easy to manage when you get used to it