We performed a comparison between IBM PowerVM and KVM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Server Virtualization Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."A valuable feature of PowerVM is a feature that is used for higher availability plus stream for posting, which is very useful. There's a flash copy feature which we are using. PowerVM itself, I know, helps us to control and manage our Oracle licensing compliance, since it is our hardware partitioning. This is very important. If you use VMware, there will be a licensing issue. This PowerVM is a hardware partitioner, which is very important for license compliance. We are happy with this solution."
"What I like about this solution, is that it is easy to configure."
"IBM PowerVM's most valuable feature is stability."
"Active Memory Sharing dynamically reallocates memory of running partitions based on changing workload demands. The memory for the pool is carved out from Physical memory and is made logical memory. The said memory is not available to be assigned to partitions as dedicated memory. A min, max and desired as well as weight is assigned to the memory of each lpar to help hypervisor make a decision in case a condition where priority is to be given to a certain lapr to use the memory form shared pool."
"The valuable feature of the solution is the technical aspects, focusing on elements like processor infinity."
"It is a complete solution."
"The feature that I like most is the versatility."
"The tool's performance is top-notch."
"Good screen and keyboard sharing feature."
"I have found KVM to be scalable."
"I find the density of the product most valuable. It is density that a technologist can just assign page merging. This is what makes KVM one of the important players of the virtualization market."
"One of the best features of KVM is its user-friendly interface."
"It offers a high-availability environment."
"Our production servers are running in Linux, and this solution supports that environment well."
"The initial setup was simple."
"KVM is stable."
"The cost of this solution is high."
"PowerVM's platform build and performance could be improved."
"I would like for IBM to be more focuses on the cloud."
"Any improvements that can be made in the interface will go a long way to helping us work better."
"I don't know whether this has been trialed already, but IBM should give us an alert when we reach seven or eight failovers so that we can automatically switch it to manual mode. That would be great because if we cross the 10-day licensing limit, we have to pay a hefty license cost to Oracle. If IBM could view that feature, it would be helpful in license compliance."
"The hardware licensing model could be improved because the licensing model is a bit different from the standard hardware procured."
"SRM for site recovery is a feature that should be included."
"The solution should be advanced to fit with the container constantly."
"Technical support is not top-notch."
"The speed is around thirty percent slower than another competitor. This would be something to work on."
"Its resource usage can be improved."
"The only negative aspect of needing hardware support is a fully functional KVM can be dropped. It would be nice if the support for other platforms, like ARM or Risk, were as good as the x86 one. However, with the democratization of Chromebooks based on these chips and mobile devices, it will not take long for that to happen."
"The main drawback in the solution is probably disaster recovery."
"Support for VF is needed, where you can, for example, export from VMware to KVM."
"The solution should be more user friendly. We are struggling with the command lines."
"The grid interface of KVM needs improvement. It could be more beautiful, especially when compared to VMware."
IBM PowerVM is ranked 9th in Server Virtualization Software with 25 reviews while KVM is ranked 4th in Server Virtualization Software with 39 reviews. IBM PowerVM is rated 8.4, while KVM is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM PowerVM writes "A stable system for high-end data processing with a great support structure". On the other hand, the top reviewer of KVM writes "Delivers good performance because of kernel-based virtualization". IBM PowerVM is most compared with VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Oracle VM VirtualBox and Proxmox VE, whereas KVM is most compared with Proxmox VE, Oracle VM VirtualBox, Hyper-V, VMware vSphere and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). See our IBM PowerVM vs. KVM report.
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