It would be very helpful if I could browse the data store directly in the GUI, similar to VMware and Hyper-V. This feature would be particularly useful when something goes wrong with a virtual machine or virtual disk.
It is a scalable product and provides great benefits for virtualization needs. However, there are a few considerations: * Cost: Citrix Hypervisor can be fairly expensive. * Complexity: There's a learning curve, especially for those coming from a Microsoft background. Setting it up and managing it can introduce some complexity. * Hardware Support: Not all major hardware vendors fully support Citrix Hypervisor. * Third-party Integration: Integrating Hypervisor with other technologies within a large ecosystem can sometimes be challenging. * Community Support: Compared to solutions like Microsoft Hyper-V, the community support for Citrix Hypervisor is somewhat less extensive. It is not vast. If there are any issues or errors, the community support is not that good. Those are definitely important disadvantages.
Citrix is not investing in the virtual surroundings. Third-party tools are bad for Citrix at the moment. No good backup recovery is available. On Microsoft, we can use Veeam, which is a great product. However, in Citrix, we were using Unitrends and Alike, but they are more or less good tools. We're not installing Unitrends again because they don't have good support for their product. And if you run into trouble, you're left in trouble, and that's not what I pay for. Alike is working stable with recovery. You can recover the system and so on. But similarly, if you run into trouble, you will be left alone, and that's not very good if you pay money for a contract. In the end, if you compare it to Veeam or other programs running on other platforms, Alike and Unitrends are behind in what's technical and the possibilities.
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.
IT Infrastructure Architect at a government with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 10
2022-12-13T14:16:24Z
Dec 13, 2022
The interface has to be updated. The management console has to be a console that can work on any platform instead of just Windows. The problem is that Mac users cannot install the management console, so they cannot manage the XenServer. We'd like to be able to move servers or machines from one pool to another pool due to the fact that it has a maximum, right now, of how many servers you can have in a pool or physical machines. Right now, if you want to move between the machines or servers, I have to close it down and move it. I cannot live migrate anything. That would be nice to do.
Vice President (Technology) at Shaligram Infotech LLP
Real User
2022-11-09T11:13:23Z
Nov 9, 2022
The solution needs better backup facilities that are available for virtual machines to create servers on. Currently, taking a backup of virtual machines running on XenServer or the Citrix Hypervisor is difficult. There has to be a better way or facility available within sites Hypervisor, Citrix Hypervisor, to take the backup of virtual machines.
Citrix could provide more tools to help the client manage the solution because we need to build our own tools in some cases. Everything is available through PowerShell, but then you need to build your own scripts to do the more advanced work.
Sr. Customer Support Engineer at Magnamious Systems Pvt. Ltd.
Real User
2022-05-13T19:16:53Z
May 13, 2022
Citrix Hypervisor is expensive if you get it as a stand-alone product, so this is one area for improvement. Its price could be cheaper. We also found other areas for improvement in Citrix Hypervisor, for example, we can't use SCIM provisioning, and there are limitations to the size of the HDD. Another area for improvement is the pass-through storage, in particular the removable storage, because that also has limitations where you can't connect to the drive if it is more than one TB.
Diretor de serviços at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
2021-12-24T10:08:00Z
Dec 24, 2021
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.
The main problem with Citrix Hypervisor is getting readily available backup solutions for it. It would be wonderful if Hypervisor were better integrated with third-party backup solutions.
Information Technology Specialist at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees
Real User
2021-09-28T15:53:00Z
Sep 28, 2021
I find that the features in Citrix Hypervisor are not as rich as with VMware. It would be a benefit if they had some of the other features VMware has, such as the ability to expand a drive on the fly. You do not have to take down the machine to do it but in Citrix you do. In a future release, Citrix Hypervisor should update its features to provide as many features as VMware does.
I'd like to see improvement in integration with other vendors and other applications, like Microsoft, for example. Operability with different kinds of hardware and infrastructure could be included so that you don't have to approach the vendor. I should be able to operate with a diverse infrastructure or RPA.
Enterprise Server and Storage Administrator at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
2021-04-20T20:36:10Z
Apr 20, 2021
I am not very sure about how flexible Citrix Hypervisor is with different types of infrastructures. I only know it is flexible with Nutanix, but I am not sure if it is also flexible with others. They can make its integration with other platforms or OEMs easy. They should also make it easy for users to manage their infrastructure. Citrix should make compatibility information related to a hypervisor easily available in a datasheet. Citrix isn't really recognized in this part of the world, and they need to expand their solution and make it more available. There are a lot of customers and companies that are looking for a solution like Citrix, and it should be available in this part of the world. They need to educate people more. Technically, it is good and flexible and has good ability, but it is not as much known as VMware or Microsoft. Their support should also be improved. Currently, if you don't have an updated version, they will not give you the attention.
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.
Manager IT at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2020-06-28T08:51:00Z
Jun 28, 2020
The licensing costs are too high on the solution. They should work to make the costs more reasonable. It is not easy to adopt this quantitative footprint. It could be helpful if we could have some sort of optimum licensing model to make the adoption of this product easier. The integration with all products needs a bit of work. There should not be any kind of limitation for cross-areas, for example, you should be able to use Linux, and any other operating system you choose. If I want to assign more than two TB of line, it is currently not supporting this. They should, however, because in some cases, you'd be required to have more than two TB of space. They should work to offer much more space than they do.
The solution is too expensive and people are kind of moving away from Citrix. It's starting to become a problem. It is a primary reason that while we are rebuilding we're going to seek out open-source solutions.
Works at a marketing services firm with 201-500 employees
Real User
2019-10-15T05:03:00Z
Oct 15, 2019
This solution needs a block-level backup. We have backup solutions in place but they are pretty arcane. That is a niche, it is not filled with professional solutions. There are solutions that can do it - if you look at solutions for file system level backups, you will find many of them. But if you look for systems with block-level backup or block-level synchronization, you will see that the tools are pretty minor.
IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees
Real User
2019-10-15T05:02:00Z
Oct 15, 2019
It is a very good product, so there really isn't much that needs to be added. Maybe the speed could be improved. It might be nice if the licensing cost could be improved because it is a big jump when you reach the threshold. A good addition might be consol management in Linux. Right now I have to start in Windows to manage the system. It is not my preference.
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.
Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
2019-10-13T05:48:00Z
Oct 13, 2019
The manageability of the solution needs improvement. It's an extremely bad product to handle. The solution needs to offer better implementation of shared storage.
Chief Operating Officer at CENTRE FOR INFECTIOUS DISEASE RESEARCH IN ZAMBIA
Real User
2019-10-13T05:48:00Z
Oct 13, 2019
The third-party integration is not very advanced. I don't know if it's a lack of interest by developers. Compared with VMware, Xenserver doesn't have a lot of third-party add-ons. Maybe in some way that can be improved. The number one feature that would make it a more robust product is a backup solution. Right now we have to buy Xen Orchestra as a separate solution to manage the tasks a little bit better. If it was integrated within the product, that would be good. Maybe Citrix should just buy Xen Orchestra and improve on it. It is a very good product. It does everything we want to do, but it's a separate product which means we have to pay another license in addition to the ones for XenServer. So I really would want to see improvements in the backup arena and a more robust clean-up job after some tasks such as snapshots fail to complete.
System Engineer & IT Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User
2019-10-13T05:48:00Z
Oct 13, 2019
The performance, storage capabilities and network are all aspects of the solution that need improvement. The solution should be more flexible and allow for greater customization.
Network Engineeer at a non-tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2019-10-13T05:48:00Z
Oct 13, 2019
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.
Citrix XenServer is a virtualization platform used in industries such as banking, automotive, and data applications for cloud automation, server virtualization, and VDI scenarios. It supports infrastructure management, virtual machine hosting, and enterprise software deployment, reducing costs by migrating from other platforms.As a virtualization tool, Citrix XenServer stands out for its ease of maintenance, support, scalability, and centralized management. Commonly deployed on-premises and...
It would be very helpful if I could browse the data store directly in the GUI, similar to VMware and Hyper-V. This feature would be particularly useful when something goes wrong with a virtual machine or virtual disk.
It is a scalable product and provides great benefits for virtualization needs. However, there are a few considerations: * Cost: Citrix Hypervisor can be fairly expensive. * Complexity: There's a learning curve, especially for those coming from a Microsoft background. Setting it up and managing it can introduce some complexity. * Hardware Support: Not all major hardware vendors fully support Citrix Hypervisor. * Third-party Integration: Integrating Hypervisor with other technologies within a large ecosystem can sometimes be challenging. * Community Support: Compared to solutions like Microsoft Hyper-V, the community support for Citrix Hypervisor is somewhat less extensive. It is not vast. If there are any issues or errors, the community support is not that good. Those are definitely important disadvantages.
Citrix is not investing in the virtual surroundings. Third-party tools are bad for Citrix at the moment. No good backup recovery is available. On Microsoft, we can use Veeam, which is a great product. However, in Citrix, we were using Unitrends and Alike, but they are more or less good tools. We're not installing Unitrends again because they don't have good support for their product. And if you run into trouble, you're left in trouble, and that's not what I pay for. Alike is working stable with recovery. You can recover the system and so on. But similarly, if you run into trouble, you will be left alone, and that's not very good if you pay money for a contract. In the end, if you compare it to Veeam or other programs running on other platforms, Alike and Unitrends are behind in what's technical and the possibilities.
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'd like them to add more automation to the product.
The interface has to be updated. The management console has to be a console that can work on any platform instead of just Windows. The problem is that Mac users cannot install the management console, so they cannot manage the XenServer. We'd like to be able to move servers or machines from one pool to another pool due to the fact that it has a maximum, right now, of how many servers you can have in a pool or physical machines. Right now, if you want to move between the machines or servers, I have to close it down and move it. I cannot live migrate anything. That would be nice to do.
The solution needs better backup facilities that are available for virtual machines to create servers on. Currently, taking a backup of virtual machines running on XenServer or the Citrix Hypervisor is difficult. There has to be a better way or facility available within sites Hypervisor, Citrix Hypervisor, to take the backup of virtual machines.
Citrix could provide more tools to help the client manage the solution because we need to build our own tools in some cases. Everything is available through PowerShell, but then you need to build your own scripts to do the more advanced work.
Citrix Hypervisor is expensive if you get it as a stand-alone product, so this is one area for improvement. Its price could be cheaper. We also found other areas for improvement in Citrix Hypervisor, for example, we can't use SCIM provisioning, and there are limitations to the size of the HDD. Another area for improvement is the pass-through storage, in particular the removable storage, because that also has limitations where you can't connect to the drive if it is more than one TB.
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.
The main problem with Citrix Hypervisor is getting readily available backup solutions for it. It would be wonderful if Hypervisor were better integrated with third-party backup solutions.
I find that the features in Citrix Hypervisor are not as rich as with VMware. It would be a benefit if they had some of the other features VMware has, such as the ability to expand a drive on the fly. You do not have to take down the machine to do it but in Citrix you do. In a future release, Citrix Hypervisor should update its features to provide as many features as VMware does.
The solution is only in English. It would be ideal if it was in Portuguese.
I'd like to see improvement in integration with other vendors and other applications, like Microsoft, for example. Operability with different kinds of hardware and infrastructure could be included so that you don't have to approach the vendor. I should be able to operate with a diverse infrastructure or RPA.
I am not very sure about how flexible Citrix Hypervisor is with different types of infrastructures. I only know it is flexible with Nutanix, but I am not sure if it is also flexible with others. They can make its integration with other platforms or OEMs easy. They should also make it easy for users to manage their infrastructure. Citrix should make compatibility information related to a hypervisor easily available in a datasheet. Citrix isn't really recognized in this part of the world, and they need to expand their solution and make it more available. There are a lot of customers and companies that are looking for a solution like Citrix, and it should be available in this part of the world. They need to educate people more. Technically, it is good and flexible and has good ability, but it is not as much known as VMware or Microsoft. Their support should also be improved. Currently, if you don't have an updated version, they will not give you the attention.
Overall, I can't think of a feature that is lacking. We've been pretty satisfied overall.
Live migration is something that can be improved. Modification of virtual machines, while they're still powered on, should be supported.
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.
The licensing costs are too high on the solution. They should work to make the costs more reasonable. It is not easy to adopt this quantitative footprint. It could be helpful if we could have some sort of optimum licensing model to make the adoption of this product easier. The integration with all products needs a bit of work. There should not be any kind of limitation for cross-areas, for example, you should be able to use Linux, and any other operating system you choose. If I want to assign more than two TB of line, it is currently not supporting this. They should, however, because in some cases, you'd be required to have more than two TB of space. They should work to offer much more space than they do.
The solution is too expensive and people are kind of moving away from Citrix. It's starting to become a problem. It is a primary reason that while we are rebuilding we're going to seek out open-source solutions.
This solution needs a block-level backup. We have backup solutions in place but they are pretty arcane. That is a niche, it is not filled with professional solutions. There are solutions that can do it - if you look at solutions for file system level backups, you will find many of them. But if you look for systems with block-level backup or block-level synchronization, you will see that the tools are pretty minor.
It is a very good product, so there really isn't much that needs to be added. Maybe the speed could be improved. It might be nice if the licensing cost could be improved because it is a big jump when you reach the threshold. A good addition might be consol management in Linux. Right now I have to start in Windows to manage the system. It is not my preference.
The USB support for the virtual server needs improvement.
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.
The manageability of the solution needs improvement. It's an extremely bad product to handle. The solution needs to offer better implementation of shared storage.
The third-party integration is not very advanced. I don't know if it's a lack of interest by developers. Compared with VMware, Xenserver doesn't have a lot of third-party add-ons. Maybe in some way that can be improved. The number one feature that would make it a more robust product is a backup solution. Right now we have to buy Xen Orchestra as a separate solution to manage the tasks a little bit better. If it was integrated within the product, that would be good. Maybe Citrix should just buy Xen Orchestra and improve on it. It is a very good product. It does everything we want to do, but it's a separate product which means we have to pay another license in addition to the ones for XenServer. So I really would want to see improvements in the backup arena and a more robust clean-up job after some tasks such as snapshots fail to complete.
The performance, storage capabilities and network are all aspects of the solution that need improvement. The solution should be more flexible and allow for greater customization.
Network management needs improvement because it is not very stable. In the next release, I would like to see more tools added, or included.
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.
The built-in networking features are a little limited.
I would like the possibility of updating the hypervisor by applying security patches. In the free version, it is a bit annoying.
The self-service user portal needs to be more granular and be more customizable.
It needs improvement with the securit
Integrated workload balancing and virtual switch management that doesn't require another virtual appliance to control.