- KVM is a relatively small piece of code, leveraging Linux for much functionality. This makes KVM easy to secure and very flexible in meeting future needs.
- Leveraging Linux means that KVM automatically gains the power of Linux’s hardware support, memory management, network utilities, cgroups, SELinux, etc.
- Features: RHEL6.3 KVM has all the features of modern hypervisors, without needing 3rd party tools: live snapshots, virtualized disk drivers (VIRTIO), live migration, live block migration, USB passthrough, guest power management, etc.
- Performance: RHEL 6.3 + KVM holds the top 7 SPECvirt spots on HP and IBM hardware, with metrics showing ~20%+ better performance than VMWare.
- Single Guest Scalability: Now supports 160 vCPUs and 2TB RAM per guest (with no additional licensing costs!)
- RHEL 7.0 will include virtual PCI bridges and will have a new Virtio-SCSI block device, enabling thousands of devices per virtual machine.
- RHEV scales up to 200 host nodes per cluster.
- Compare the above numbers with VMWare
- KVM has achieved World Record IOPS: 1,402,720 IOPS on a IBM x3850 X5 for 8KB request using 7 SCSI pass-through devices.. For 1 KB requests, can achieve 1.65M IOPS.
- RHEV 7 will support Windows power virtualization
- RHEL 6.3 brings vCPU and memory hotplug to guests
- KVM has achieved CC-EAL4+ certification with RHEV 5, and is in process of certification with RHEV 6, with sVirt (SELinux wrapped around guests).
- Decommissioned guest storage can be scrubbed, meeting PCI-DSS standards.
- Open Virtualization Alliance promotes open source virtualization and KVM ecosystem.
mjs.fyi 