Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) vs. Nutanix AHV

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

Nutanix AHV

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
KVM	Score 2.1 out of 10	N/A	Kernel-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
Nutanix AHV	Score 9.0 out of 10	N/A	Nutanix AHV is presented as a modern and secure virtualization platform that powers VMs and containers for applications and cloud-native workloads on-premises and in public clouds. Its tools and automated workflows simplify the day-to-day administration of VMs and containers.	N/A

Pricing

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

Nutanix AHV

Editions & Modules

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
KVM	Nutanix AHV
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

—

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)	Nutanix AHV
Considered Both Products	KVM Verified User Anonymous Chose KVM Kernel-based Virtual Machine is an open-source and free solution, compared to Virtualbox which is a product from Oracle. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose KVM The key points why I made my decision for KVM in comparison with VMWare are: Freeware software (I am using an Ubuntu server OS), Fewer resources usage, vSwitch using that provides the ability to configure dot1q trunks to/between VMs, Stability, and simplicity of … Incentivized Helpful? RM Robert Munteanu Software Engineer Chose KVM Compared to VirtualBox, KVM has simpler licensing terms and is supported by the operating system vendor. KVM also has more mature integrations with other open-source projects. Automating provisioning is simple with KVM since it is available in the package repositories of … Incentivized Helpful? Valentin Höbel Senior Consultant IT Infrastructure Chose KVM KVM is free and provides environments where guests can run their own Kernel while still performing very well. It is also very native to work with KVM since it is integrated within the Linux Kernel. Incentivized Helpful? Stenio Pereira Filho IT Group manager Chose KVM 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 Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose KVM We've found KVM to be less problematic, both from a stabilty standpoint, but also in a flexibility and licensing standpoint. We love being able to deploy the hardware we want, as we want it, without needing the blessing of a specific vendor. Incentivized Helpful?	Nutanix AHV GP Gourgopal Pradhan Consultant Chose Nutanix AHV Nutanix AHV offers simplified management and cost-effectiveness benefits. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Nutanix AHV Easy to understand and friendly Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Nutanix AHV Overall market share, reputation and innovation drove us to Nutanix AHV over the other options. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Nutanix AHV We left VMware due to the price alone, and we have no regrets. Nutanix has been a reliable and efficient platform. Incentivized Helpful? Wouter Zijlstra Servicedeskmedewerker Chose Nutanix AHV Nutanix AOS makes the basic operations (adding recourses and performing updates) a lot easier. Incentivized Helpful? Christopher Cundall Data Centre & Infrastructure Specialist Chose Nutanix AHV 50/50, not much in it, to be honest. Nutanix AOS wins on the support, training, and certification ease but Dell / EMC has the name and integration support with its other products (e.g., Nutanix not supporting Networkers hot add mode). Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Nutanix AHV By far, in my opinion, Nutanix AOS is heads above VMware. From the creation of a VM to updating the nodes themselves, Nutanix AOS is so much easier, faster, and just an overall better product. I would choose Nutanix AOS over VMware any day. Incentivized Helpful? HM Hardeep Mohan Director Chose Nutanix AHV Vmware , Cisco HyperFlex Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Nutanix AHV VMware ESXi has been around much longer and because of this is much more fully featured. However, on the flip side, it then makes Nutanix AOS much less complicated to operate. Nutanix AOS online support (and knowledge base articles) are very well written and comprehensive. … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Nutanix AHV Nutanix [AOS] is a hyper-converged solution, and in the vSphere it was originally designed for the use of SAN, although they also have a hyper-converged solution. But the architecture and load testing showed the inconsistency of the hyper-converged solution from VMware. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Nutanix AHV Nutanix [AOS] is the preference as it has good management tools but may be a bit more costly. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Nutanix AHV The simplicity of the license means no need for a new storage array and hardware. Gartner report. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Nutanix AHV Nutanix is faster and easier, and more reliable than HPE SimpliVity. Incentivized Helpful? Tyler Twitchell Senior System Engineer Chose Nutanix AHV As mentioned before I feel that Nutanix meets or exceeds the capabilities of the competition, where that is in ease of use, how well they support their platform, upgrading software, migrating VM's from another hypervisor to Nutanix or simply moving VM's between one Nutanix … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Nutanix AHV VMWare is too complex to run in compare to Nutanix Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Nutanix AHV Ease of use and better support to the business. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Nutanix AHV Nutanix AOS is far superior to VMware. Both in cost and performance. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Nutanix AHV Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer), VMware Horizon (formerly VMware View) and VMware ESXi Incentivized Helpful? Hernán Paggi Jefe de Departamento de TI Chose Nutanix AHV Our experience was good with VMware, but much more and on another level with Nutanix. Incentivized Helpful? Nathan Roberts Director, Management Information Systems Chose Nutanix AHV There are other clustering solutions, to be sure. And there are significantly less expensive solutions for preventing downtime, such as Hyper-V replication, which is what I was using before Nutanix. But Nutanix is in the upper-right of the Gartner magic quadrant for … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Nutanix AHV VxRail was more expensive and used a different storage algorithm that we didn't find to be most efficient . Incentivized Helpful? JL Joe Lemaire Network Architect Chose Nutanix AHV We looked at both Simplivity and Cisco Hyperflex. Both are pretty good in their own right. Simplivity was very 'efficient' in the way they handled data, but we didn't like the idea of a propitiatory hardware card. Cisco's Hyperflex was our second choice, but we were so … Incentivized Helpful?

Features

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

Nutanix AHV

Server Virtualization

Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) 9.2 Ratings 12% above category average	Nutanix AHV 8.9 Ratings 9% above category average
Virtual machine automated provisioning	9.00 Ratings	8.80 Ratings
Management console	9.00 Ratings	8.80 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup	9.70 Ratings	9.10 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration	9.00 Ratings	8.60 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security	9.50 Ratings	9.10 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)	Nutanix AHV
Small Businesses	DigitalOcean Droplets Score 8.7 out of 10	DigitalOcean Droplets Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	VMware vSOM (discontinued) Score 10.0 out of 10	VMware vSOM (discontinued) Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises	VMware vSOM (discontinued) Score 10.0 out of 10	VMware vSOM (discontinued) Score 10.0 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)	Nutanix AHV
Likelihood to Recommend	9.3 (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	- (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	- (0 ratings)	9.1 (0 ratings)
Performance	- (0 ratings)	8.9 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	- (0 ratings)	9.1 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)	Nutanix AHV
Likelihood to Recommend	Kernel-based Virtual Machine is very well suited when one needs a single-node virtualization host or needs to build a complex demo setting on their own notebook (e.g. when demonstrating solutions to a customer). Incentivized Valentin Höbel Senior Consultant IT Infrastructure Read full review	[Nutanix AOS] is good when you need easy scaling and high reliability. The good architecture of the solution allows to solve the tasks set for the platform. This solution allows to reduce the number of personnel serving the infrastructure due to the ease of management and a good knowledge base. As a disadvantage, I would attribute the complexity of customizing some types of loads to optimal work on DFS, for example, high-load databases. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	Lightweight built-in implementation for all *nix based OS. Easy to deploy and manage VMs. Freeware (is you are using a free OS). Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	One component to support both compute and storage needs for virtualization. Easy expandable as business needs arise both at the node level and larger with blocks. Well outlined interface with good historical data. API tools are available to obtain logging information from Nutanix that can be used with other monitoring tools such as Splunk. Incentivized Tyler Twitchell Senior System Engineer Read full review
Cons	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 Valentin Höbel Senior Consultant IT Infrastructure Read full review	Management of VMs on AHV take some getting used to. It's just a list of VMs that are displayed, and you search through it. Not the normal folder structure that I'm used to in VMware. Also can't disable a NIC card in a VM in AHV. Very handy feature present in VMware. Larger workloads may have to be tweaked to get the performance you need/want. Incentivized JL Joe Lemaire Network Architect Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	No answers on this topic	We made a huge financial investment with this platform (four clusters, all-flash storage array), so we're in it for the long haul. Luckily it's a beast. I've had to use support more than any other platform I've administered, but the help has been very good. Nutanix continues to add features and innovations which increase the ROI Incentivized Nathan Roberts Director, Management Information Systems Read full review
Usability	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Nutanix Prism Element and Prism Central are easy-to-use HTML5-based web consoles. The layout makes sense; you're only a few clicks away from getting to where you need to be. The AHV hypervisor is integrated into the platform for a fast and seamless experience. Rich data on VM metrics is also available. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Performance	No answers on this topic	The performance is very impressive. I am used to VMware and the snapshots were taking 10 minutes. The first time I had to restore from a snapshot on Nutanix it took 5 seconds and I couldn't believe it. Everything done on the server is fast. Powering on VM is done in seconds compared.to what we were using before. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	No answers on this topic	Our first support ticket to Nutanix was responded to within 10 minutes of submission. That was kind of impressive. They have worldwide support so that when a support request is created, support is acknowledged in a relative short amount of time. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	The key points why I made my decision for KVM in comparison with VMWare are: Freeware software (I am using an Ubuntu server OS), Fewer resources usage, vSwitch using that provides the ability to configure dot1q trunks to/between VMs, Stability, and simplicity of using/troubleshooting, Well-known interface (for Linux geeks). Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	By far, in my opinion, Nutanix AOS is heads above VMware. From the creation of a VM to updating the nodes themselves, Nutanix AOS is so much easier, faster, and just an overall better product. I would choose Nutanix AOS over VMware any day. Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	Capital expenditure costs are low, because is open-source and free Operational expenditure costs are medium because it's necessary [to have] an IT team with experience in Linux First step to the virtualization world. Wake up, we are in the 21st century Incentivized Stenio Pereira Filho IT Group manager Read full review	It is a highly redundant solution Nutanix [AOS] provides a simple easy to manage HCI platform with a reduced TCO and an increased ROI Centralized management solution of consolidated sever and storage solution in a virtualized environment which minimizes wastage of valuable resourses Offers businesses the agility and flexibility to run other virtualized platforms on the Nutanix environment Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
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