Citrix XenServer Reviews

My primary use of the product is for the purpose of server virtualization. It is used for virtualizing our web servers.

It provides a free, easy means of virtualization which would otherwise be costly to implement.

I'm currently using the free version, so I'm limited as to what I find the most valuable in the broader set of product features. For me, just the ability to virtualize servers is the most valuable.

To improve the product, I would like to be able to use the high availability of XenServer but the free version does not have that feature. I would really like to have a different trial option so I could try out the broader set of available options even if it is for a limited time.

It's pretty complicated to set up the server order and that can be simplified in the product. If a server shuts down the order in which the virtual servers will come up should be something that I can designate easily. The order can make a difference in a successful startup.

I have been using the product for more than a year.

As far as stability, I haven't had a problem. I highly recommend the product and I think it deserves good feedback as to stability.

The scalability is good. I really like the cloning option as it makes scaling easy. I don't have a problem with enhancing my setup. I'm very satisfied with it. 

I never request any technical support for the product directly from the company so I can not speak to the product support directly. I found the community and the forum very helpful when I had questions. The people there are very helpful. It is easy to find a solution if I have any problems.

The setup for the product is pretty straightforward. I use it straight out of the box in the limited free version on two servers that allows me to configure virtualization. It's a pretty easy solution to install and use.

I installed the product myself. I did not require assistance.

It is nice to be able to have a product that is free to use. Although it is simple, it does what I need it to do. The version you pay for has more features. I know that I would like to use some of the features in the paid version, but I can not justify the cost at this time.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate XenServer as an eight. There are some problems, but it is also not the full release version.

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.

I primarily use the solution for virtualization. I have about five virtual servers on it.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is very fast. It also works very well for physically small servers.

The USB support for the virtual server needs improvement.

I've been using the solution for half a yer.

The solution is very stable. It works very well.

My environment is very small, so I don't have much experience with scaling the solution.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I handled the implementation myself.

We use the free version, not the commercial version of the solution.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I would recommend the solution. I was looking for a solution that works well on a small server, and this solution works very well for me.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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

We have customers that are using Citrix Hypervisor in different environments, such as with storage and without.

Citrix Hypervisor does a great job overall, such as the virtualization of the host. It's very easy to manage the virtual machine, to create, and configure high availability.

It can be useful to have a web management program because we have to install our client-server. We have to properly manage the host, if we had administration tools through a web interface it would be a benefit.

I used Citrix Hypervisor within the last 12 months.

Citrix Hypervisor is stable.

I have found Citrix Hypervisor to be scalable.

We don't use the support. It's really rare to use the support because we are the customer support. I don't remember the last time we spoke to Citrix support directly.

The setup is very easy.

The time it takes for the implementation depends on the size of the infrastructure, but specifically, with Hypervisor, we don't need a large amount of staff, one technician can handle the process.

Citrix Hypervisor is a very good solution and it really fits a lot of environments. Everybody considers VMware or Hyper-V from Microsoft as the main solution, but everybody should consider Citrix Hypervisor for their use case.

I rate Citrix Hypervisor a nine out of ten.

There are some points to improve, but it's a really good solution.

We primarily use the solution for deploying. Usually we're deploying infrastructure based on XenServer desktop solutions.

The solution is easy to deploy. It's very easy to understand problems and read logs.

The solution would benefit from faster technical support.

The solution should add session sharing in future releases. It would be helpful if, for example, you could switch a user from one terminal server to another terminal server without loosing the session and without the need to log off and then log on again. This way we can put in place some services, without asking the user to log out. We can just move users from one server to another and the user would not notice any interruption.

I've been using the solution for six or seven months.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is extremely scalable.

We're not satisfied with technical support. It's very slow.

The solution is easy to deploy.

The solution is free to use.

We use the private cloud deployment model.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It depends on what an organization requires, but I would recommend the solution.

The high availability facility.

Use of this solution has reduced our costs, and we have a collection of over three 42U server rack cabinets.

The web management provided by Citrix needs to be improved.

I have used XenServer since 2012.

We had some issues with the iSCSI multipath setup.

Some older versions of the Intel 550 chipset caused some instability with XenServer.

No issues yet.

Customer Service:

It's good.

Technical Support:

It's good.

We had a previous solution and changed because the solution lacked some features that we needed.

It was straightforward.

The whole setup was done in-house.

It's large enough that it is appreciated by management.

• VMWare
• Hyper-V

Just use the best solution for your own business.

XenServer have four different editions: Free, Advanced, Enterprise, Platinum. You can ask for free license at no cost but you have to renew it each year. The free edition lacks some features that are only available on the other three editions. We can easily access XenServer from XenCenter; we can even manage multiple XenServer from a single XenCenter.

XenCenter is not available on Mac OS X or Linux, so we can only manage XenServer(s) from Windows. XenServer also lack of web based administration interface. We have to install XenServer on a dedicated machine, we can’t even have XenServer dual boot with another OS because XenServer installation will wipe the whole drive before installation. The processor that we use has to support virtualization (Intel-VT or AMD-V).

Good alternative of VMware ESXi, you can use free version to try the product first and perhaps move to the paid version if you need support or you need features that is not available in the free version.