Citrix XenServer Reviews

The primary use case of this solution is for providing virtual machines to the customers.

It reduced the number of physical workstations. There was a requirement to have several different workstations physically.

Also, it helped us to keep it standard. This allowed more management of the virtual machines.

The most valuable features are being able to host many virtual machines and being able to patch machines. For example, have a primary and secondary machine and being able to put the user on one machine and patch up the other one and rotate.

Some of the tools are different from VMware and there are some issues with speed in the network.

They need to have some cleared individuals on their team.

There are some limits, and technical support could be improved. The online documentation could be better found within the accounts. 

There is an issue with having an actual account versus a standard account. 

You need a licensed account to look up technical support.

Better return time when reaching out for support would be an improvement.

I had been working with Citrix Hypervisor for approximately six years.

They incremented every new version that came out from XenServer 6 to 7.5.

There were several times where there were some glitches or it crashed. 

Our network is a standalone one that is not connected to the outside. Being able to either update or get any type of support without allowing outside into the internal network was sometimes difficult.

It's a scalable solution. It's easy to scale.

We looked at scaling and going into machine creation services where you have one machine and that's the gold master machine in the update.

We have approximately 150 users in our organization. 

Their roles were mostly purposes, usual work.

I have used technical support. They were helpful but not helpful for the environment that I worked with because of security reasons. We couldn't give access to the internal network.

Previously, we did not use another solution. We started with Citrix Hypervisor.

I was not a part of the setup process.

I would definitely suggest that you do a trade study with other Hypervisors available.

I would rate Citrix Hypervisor a six out of ten.

On-premises

Xen is an open source virtualization server widely used in IT. It provides simple and robust commands to manage Xen environment for managing virtual hosts.Backup and recovery of virtual hosts are simple. It can be managed remotely with XenCenter. It supports all client OS like windows, linux etc !!

It requires system with large number of CPUs and large number of memory to support guest operating systems. Not able to export virtual hosts in other virtualization softwares.

I have been using Xen for 4 servers now and still using it. 

Highly recommended and suited for administrators having sound knowledge of open source commands. !!

Basic virtualization, we used it before we already had the license as we’re a Citrix shop, so it’s cost effective. If we were looking for another solution, we wouldn't go with it.

• Eease of maintenance
• Ability to move around regardless of hardware
• We're not tied to single piece of hardware, so if a piece of hardware fails we can quickly adjust

All partners will build their apps around Hyper-V and vSphere, so XenServer needs to gain more market share with better relationship with their partners so that they’re incentivized to improve XenServer. It’s not functionality that will drive me away, it’s that I can’t integrate as well as with other vendors.

We rarely have issues. I come across bugs once in a while, but that’s pretty rare.

It’s highly scalable, haven’t run into any hardware issues that would prevent growth. We don’t have any old, legacy hardware we’re tiring to fit in.

Very good, they get us to the right level technician pretty quickly so we’re not just walking through a checklist. We get someone who knows what they’re talking about.

Pretty straightforward.

We figured it out on our own. Good documentation and set of options is less to roll out.

Research the different partners you have to work with throughout your organization and determine how well they work with Hyper-V and vSphere as opposed to XenServer.

High-availability options in a cluster are good.

We were able to create a very inexpensive (nearly free) cluster of VM hosts.

Permissions granularity was very limited - we could not assign permissions on anything smaller than the entire cluster. Support for OS'es without paravirtualization-friendly device drivers was very limited - couldn't run some versions of Linux.

6 months

Clustered-host hardware needed to be identical, all-or-nothing permissions didn't work well for VM's owned by different teams.

Lots of errors, which may or may not have been important.  It was tough to assess the health of the cluster.

n/a - we used the free, open-source distribution of XenServer.

Used VMWare, before and after. VMWare was more expensive.

Initial software setup of XenServer is very simple, but the hardware setup is more complex. Switching and shared-storage infrastructure needed to be mapped out in advance (which is true for any VM-host-cluster environment).

in-house

Also tried oVirt, the FOSS project, similar to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. This had some very promising features, but was difficult to implement, and had some hardware and OS compatibility issues when running on CentOS.

Citrix or third-party software would probably make it more flexible and powerful than the plain, FOSS XenServer components.

XenServer is my favorite virtualization product. After previewing Vmware, Xen, and Hyper-V, I found this to be the easiest. You don't have to know linux to use. I like that XenServer can import virtual machines from any of the other hypervisors. I use scheduled snapshots and archiving, to where I don't have to worry if my machines are backed up. XenMotion is a breeze and makes it extremely easy to upgrade or change out servers. I also like that you can have heterogeneous pools with XenServer Advanced or above.

You have to set limits on scheduled snapshots, otherwise it won't let you take more. I have a limit of 7 days, with daily snapshots. The free version is somewhat limited in features. It is best for testing or small organizations. Something that might be a con is that when all of your servers are virtualized, you may not need some of your IT staff.

I use this to host all of my servers and my virtual desktops. This has saved my organization a ton of money. Although there is a high initial cost, it has paid for itself in the long run. If you are planning on doing a VDI solution, I would recommend using the same company for virtualization. For XenDesktop, use XenServer; for Vmware VDI, use ESXI. To test the full features of XenServer, try out the open source equivalent- Xen Cloud Platform.

I use XenServer to migrate all the old servers of my clients. I think it is a robust, proven and free option.

I find it very easy to manage and at a cost that small customers would never refuse (free).

The most valuable feature is the possibility of creating virtual machine templates from a snapshot and vice versa. It saves me many hours of work.

I would like the possibility of updating the hypervisor by applying security patches. In the free version, it is a bit annoying.

I have been using this solution since 2011.

I use Citrix Hypervisor for virtualization.

The most valuable feature of this product is that its scripting can automate procedures. I have also had a very good experience with its storage.

I have been using this solution for almost ten years.

I had no problems with the initial setup.

The cost of this product is not high.

Citrix is an excellent tool, we don't have any issues or complaints about it. I would rate this solution as ten out of ten.

On-premises

The primary use case of this solution is to manage virtual servers under Citrix.

The deployment model we are using is on-premises.

What I like the most is the support of the GPU Graphics and the VM Live migration.

Network management needs improvement because it is not very stable.

In the next release, I would like to see more tools added, or included.

I have been using this solution for one year.

This solution is stable.

There are approximately three hundred users.

The technical support is very good.

Previously we used a different solution but this one is better.

The initial setup is simple and straightforward.

This solution is open source, it's free.

Version eight of this solution is complete.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.