Citrix XenServer Reviews

This product makes up our infrastructure and we use it to host several servers.

The continued uptime of our virtual machines is good. If there's a problem with one host, the machines get migrated off. This is something that works well.

Live migration is something that can be improved.

Modification of virtual machines, while they're still powered on, should be supported.

I have been working with Citrix Hypervisor for about a year and a quarter.

The newest revision appears to be pretty stable.

This is a scalable solution.

I have worked with other hypervisors in the past and Citrix is a little more basic.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

Citrix is a good low-cost alternative to VMware, so if budgeting is an issue then I would recommend it.

I would rate this solution a seven 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.

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 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.