Likelihood to Recommend I think nowadays, Amazon EC2 is best-suited for most app development and deployment use cases, especially if your resource requirements are not fixed over a long period of time. The flexibility provided by the on-demand pricing and rescaling option makes Amazon EC2 a great service, especially if your tech stack already runs on AWS. On the other hand, I think Amazon EC2 is not the best option if your tech infrastructure runs on another public cloud.
Read full review It can be really helpful & useful if we are using Citrix Hypervisor with other provisioning tools. Here are some specific scenarios where Citrix Hypervisor (formerly Citrix XenServer) is well-suited: Server Consolidation, Virtual Desktops, Disaster Recovery, Development & Testing Environments. On the other hand, there are some scenarios where Citrix Hypervisor may be less appropriate: Small-scale Deployments, Highly Heterogeneous Environments, and Limited Virtualization Requirements.
Read full review Pros A great variety of choices in Amazon Machine Image (AMI) types. Users can select a more basic type to run generic workloads, but also have the choice to pick an AMI pre-installed with specific services in the AWS Marketplace. The range of instance types can support the usage from a student's exploration (inexpensive general-purpose nano instances) to an enterprise's most intense workloads (memory or storage-optimized instances with terabytes of memory and ultra-fast network connection). The pricing options, from regular instances, reserved instances to spot instances allow users to get the job done and make smart choices about how much they want to pay and when they want to pay. Read full review Citrix hypervisor does price very well for small organizations. It is free. Since this product is open source it does not have any type of vendor lockdown issues. Allows live migration of VM's so you can keep systems up and running when changes are needed to the hardware in the background. The GUI management tools are quite easy to learn. Has Snapshot capability which is a great way to protect against malware as well as do risk-free upgrades. Read full review Cons This service is a bit difficult to consume. New users need a big learning curve to use this service effectively. UI for EC2 service is a little complex and at many places, it misses detailed explanation. Sometimes it takes too long to create images of EC2 instances. This keeps your EC2 up for that extra time. When instances are heavy, it penalizes a lot of money. Read full review Adding or presenting additional storage to the host can often be a task that is far more involved than competitive products. The product can require reboots more frequently than competitors due to the DOM kernel getting "hung up". Sometimes when a virtual machine is deleted it still leaves behind orphaned vdisks. Recovering from the loss of a host can sometimes cause virtual machines to require lengthy command prompt scripting to fix so they can be powered back on from another host. Read full review Likelihood to Renew With the knowledge and usage of solutions from VMware and Microsoft offering more compelling cloud integrated options it makes it more compelling in many environments which I consult. XenServer is a good product and fits the bill in many smaller environments but as clients look to the cloud or a hybrid cloud it can in some cases make it a bit more difficult.
Read full review Usability Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows various ways of gaining incidents, such as slow growth, money, and the reserved ones, mostly depend entirely on the necessity, because it makes highly intelligent choices possible at these times, which enable considerable cost savings whilst addressing the situation as best I like.
Read full review XenServer is quite usable due to the simplicity the management and installation provide for an administrator. The console for management is very intuitive and can easily be installed on any Windows operating system. There is a relatively simple web console that can be implemented as well that enhances the usability to provide service to non-administrators.
Read full review Reliability and Availability It's been a little problematic in the past at larger VDI deployments requiring a bit more care and feeding than other vendors. But the latest releases (6.5.x) have brought about huge improvements in the stability and availability.
Read full review Performance When running like a top XenServer is a fantastic hypervisor. There is relatively low overhead on the Dom0 so workloads get the most of the resources.
Read full review Support Rating AWS's support is good overall. Not outstanding, but better than average. We have had very little reason to engage with AWS support but in our limited experience, the staff has been knowledgeable, timely and helpful. The only negative is actually initiating a service request can be a bit of a pain.
Read full review The staff I've worked with are very knowledgeable or able to get a very well articulated and capable support team member on the phone or helping them if necessary and they always want to ensure the best experience possible for you on the platform. The ability for the support team to reach out to hardware vendors for assistance is a nice plus too.
Read full review In-Person Training Part of a training for certification to become a trainer for Citrix included an in-person training with a Master CCI. The XenServer training at this time was pretty simplified due to the product primarily being installed however you did have to work with it and mildly configure the system.
Read full review Online Training Haven't given it a real go with any online training however there are some options out there. I have taught a course following Citrix material for
XenDesktop which leverages XenServer and it is pre-built so not the best for XenServer specifically for installation but configuration is mildly touched on
Read full review Implementation Rating Ensure you review the HCL (hardware compatibility list) and reach out to the hardware vendors to ensure they support the platform and in case they have documentation that can be followed for the implementation. Also ensure the prerequisites are completed prior to implementation so that as few unexpected delays occur as you can control.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Azure VM and
Google Compute Engine are alternatives to EC2. AWS EC2 is most matures and advanced of the 3. All these provide easy-to-deploy and automatically configured third-party applications, including single virtual machine or multiple virtual machine solutions.
Read full review Feature for feature they are neck and neck. I have used Hyper-V 2012 and 2016,
VMware ESXi and XenServer evenly. XenServer is a fast install, good documentation, with enterprise features out the box that compare or exceed what VMWare offered with a higher cost of entry.
Read full review Scalability The servers latest versions have made massive improvements to scalability. But from past experience there have been issues when running workloads for extended periods of time without reboot on the hosts. I would need to run similar workloads on the 6.5 release which has changed much of the bottlenecks or issues so I'd imagine its far more capable now, Perhaps able to stand near the best in the market.
Read full review Return on Investment AWS has had a very positive return on investment for every client we have that uses it. They are saving money in the long run. AWS includes the underlying operating system licenses with their EC2 instances so no longer do we have to navigate through Microsoft licensing headache. EC2 allows us to easily create a golden image of servers and store them as AMIs. This makes spinning up new servers that need a particular set of software in the future extremely easy and cost-effective. Read full review Xenserver is easy to learn. We paid for support only for installation and deployment in the first three years, and now our team has the knowledge to solve most problems. Low CAPEX if you have a team that uses open source software day by day. But paid support is necessary to solve critical problems. The open source community is not enough. Actually, we have difficulty solving some bugs without paying for support. Medium OPEX if you have a team that uses open source software day by day. Read full review ScreenShots