My organization is into construction engineering, and we currently use Hypervisor in six farms. We use the solution for server and desktop virtualization. We have one farm with 40 virtual machines for our engineers. We couldn't do it as a terminal server because the licensing model of the different companies' products we are working with doesn't allow terminal servers. We had to virtualize whole machines. During Corona, all our workers needed home offices. We were lacking in the way we used it before Corona, where we only used it to virtualize security and administration. We had to expand it to other workers.
Citrix Hypervisor is simple to use.
The user interface's graphics are pretty bad. I have to go into the command line interface to reach any solution. If I get in trouble, I'll need the CLI. When there are no problems, the GUI is enough.
All the same, if there are troubles in Hypervisor, such as If you have had a brownout or a server breakdown, bare metal, or split-brain problems, you can't mend these problems with the graphical user interface. You always have to go through the CLI. We once lost connection to our storage during an update from version 7 to 8. There were no particular problems, but the effect was that all the metadata had gone. So we had 20 or 40 server images but no metadata. It had vanished completely. We had to mount each disk and look into where it may have been before, and we needed to reconstruct all the metadata from scratch. Last time we had our first update in VMware VxRail, into the previous release, from 6 to 7, and we had to start the update, wait, and then it finished without any problems. It was really easy.
In Citrix, you always have to look for reasons why it might not have worked. Even if you use the rolling upgrade, it may happen that in the middle of the installation, a window pops up for some reason, making it impossible to finish the installation. It's a platform that doesn't work, and you have to reconstruct a lot by hand.
We have been working with Citrix Hypervisor for about 11 years. I'm using version 8.2.
I rate Citrix Hypervisor's stability a six out of ten. The product works for small, medium, and enterprise companies. We have small offices with two or three people, where we give them one server with Citrix implemented, with a backup service, a local data repository, and all functions present in one system. It has worked for years, with and without former services, working even better with former services. We also have our headquarters with 600 workers. Over there, we have never faced really hard problems, but the solution is too dependent on people. We do not have the manpower to keep it running all the time because we have holidays when some staff members are not available. Failure can lead to breakdowns where all 600 people cannot work.
At our peak, we had about 600 workers working from home and 600 virtual machines running on our farms.
Technical support was a problem. We had a consultant where I'm currently working because we had performance problems. The consultant reviewed our installations and said they were okay because we did the installation the same way they would have. Yet the problem was not solved. We virtualized security and administration, but people always faced difficulties, wanting their PCs back instead of a terminal. It was a smart installation that was easy to manage and roll out to computers, but the user experience was so bad that we reverted it. Today, every user has a PC again. The only people that still use Citrix are those not working from home. It's such a poor solution for those working from home because the solution's performance is not like it is at the office. At the office, there is no acceptance of low performance. We contacted Citrix in Munich and another consultant on the Internet, and there was no way to solve this performance problem. Even today, I don't know to whom or which way I should go to get support from Citrix. There is no address or community I could contact if I have problems. Tech support is not as good as it could be.
At first, the initial setup looks very straightforward. It could become very complex if you have needs with performance, drivers, special hardware, or USB interfaces. Implementing the product from scratch for one farm takes a day at most. We need two people for deployment, one for the server and one for the users.
We used it only for some desktop licenses, so the pricing is great. We used the free licenses for server virtualization.
My problem with Hypervisor is its weak service. We formerly had SAN Desktop, and I could install as many SAN Desktop and server licenses as needed to make them work without cost. It is not cheap at the moment, but the prices are low. Now I have to look for an alternative, but I have to look for the prices first and to make a budget. I am looking for different products, but the alternative must be from VMware. The decision was made two years ago, and we have to make it work this year or next year latest.
We changed to VMware because our boss says it is all in the GUI, but during the implementation of the three first farms, we had an external technician, and most of his work was on the command line interface. It looks a little better, but if you have problems or you need to customize it, it's always on the CLI. I am a real Citrix fan, but that opinion is not important at this time.
If you can find someone who provides support, it's a good experience. We might not have always reached our targets or found a solution, but customer support has always made time for us and given us good tips. I have handled problems by printing out all the documentation, which has helped me through eleven years of using the solution.
Citrix Hypervisor needs to be easier to update and upgrade and be reversible if something goes wrong.
It's of no use if you have a system that's not ready or does not work. We need an update that starts and runs. And if it does not work for any reason, it should be able to be reverted to a point before, especially if there are simple failures, like losing metadata, because it is a lot of work to reconstruct it from nothing. The simple updating and maintenance are better than today. It's a really good product. If it were up to me, we would still use it and use it in the future.
Overall, I rate the product an eight or nine out of ten.
