Ensemble learning is an important research direction in machine learning, in recent years, support vector machine (SVM) ensemble has attracted the attentions of researchers in the field of machine learning and statistical learning, and has become an active research hotspot. The research and application of SVM ensemble in recent years are surveyed in this paper and the fundamental problems in SVM ensemble are discussed. Methods of constructing SVM base classifiers with higher diversity, effective ways for combining base classifiers, and the typical applications of SVM ensemble are discussed and analyzed. The problems those exist in the research and application of SVM ensemble are pointed out and the important research directions are given.