Likelihood to Recommend Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops is best in class for offering a great user experience in VDI, server-based sessions, or published apps. Using additional GPU allows uses like rich video, 3D apps, and great modern uses (MS Teams, Office 365, Zoom, etc.). Citrix products are very well integrated (Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops used with Citrix ADC is the best way to secure access and monitor everything).
Read full review If budgets are stretched, Hyper-V is a very cost effective solution. Any veteran MS Windows administrators will have little issue in getting to grips with this. If you are familiar with VMware solutions, then you may find Hyper-V a little frustrating as it does lack some of the functionality of those products, however nothing that will prevent you from managing your virtual workloads and estate. Since rolling out Hyper-V 2019 we have had no real issues with it; ESXi seemed to have more issues and was less forgiving with hardware compatibility.
Read full review Pros Enables remote access anywhere, to any device which eliminates managing the endpoints how traditional VPN would require. Integrates well with modern applications to offer optimized user experiences similar to native applications which increases user acceptance. Extremely flexible in how policies are applied to different use cases to ensure the appropriate security mitigations are in place with minimal effort. Easy to maintain and expand environments to fit business needs. Read full review Easy to use GUI - very easy for someone with sufficient Windows experience - not necessarily a system administrator. Provisioning VMs with different OSes - we mostly rely on different flavors of Windows Server, but having a few *nix distributions was not that difficult. Managing virtual networks - we usually have 1 or 2 VLANs for our business purposes, but we are happy with the outcomes. Read full review Cons A single console to manage the environment. The configuration is a bit complicated and we have hired Citrix administrators. But it's a good solution. User profiles need improvement. They could use more stability and more functionality as well as user profile redirection. Read full review The only issue I have with Hyper-V is I am unable to use Veeam on my Windows 2016 Server to backup my FreeBSD HAProxy VM. There is some sort of checkpoint issue that I have been unable to figure out, but it works just fine on my Windows 2012 Servers. I do believe this is a Microsoft issue and not a Veeam issue though. Another thing that could be useful that Hyper-V does not have would be some sort of GUI that shows the status of all the VM's on a given server to help us manage them easier and know what is going on. However, I do have Zabbix for this and that does a good job at monitoring all my servers. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Because it has been a mainstay of our business for many years.
Read full review Cheap and easy is the name of the game. It has great support, it doesn't require additional licenses, it works the same if it is a cluster or stand-alone, and all the servers can be centrally managed from a system center virtual machine manager server, even when located at remote sites.
Read full review Usability Getting the environment setup took me three months of off and on work, with 3 complete rebuilds of the environment. Utilizing the WebUI to access the environment had presented so many random issues that we had to require end users to use the Citrix Reciever App. As it was the only stable solution. Aside from that, it hasn't required much admin intervention since the stand-up was completed.
Read full review It is very easy to configure new virtual machines and manage them. But you have to use different interfaces to perform various tasks. Especially as soon as it comes to clustering you have to use at least two different interfaces (Hyper-V Manager and Failover-Cluster Manager) to perform all necessary tasks. The newly released Windows Admin Center is a way into the right direction to get all management tasks into one single interface.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Xendesktop did a great job with HA of all the components.
Read full review In the past 2 years our Hyper-V servers have only had a handful of instances where the VM's on them were unreachable and the physical Hyper-V server had to be restarted. One time this was due to a RAM issue with the physical box and was resolved when we stopped using dynamic memory in Hyper-V. The other times were after updates were installed and the physical box was not restarted after the updates were installed.
Read full review Performance The performance of XenDesktop is the best in the industry because of the fine-tuned protocol and years of updating. Overall, I don't think there is a better performer on the market. The question is if the added complexity of running XenDesktop is really worth the performance gain. While the latest version of XenDesktop is the easiest to deploy so far, it is still more challenging than the competitors.
Read full review Hyper-V itself works quickly and rarely gave performance issues but this can be more attributed to the physical server specifications that the actual Hyper-V software in my opinion as Hyper-V technically just utilizes config files such as xml, and a data drive file (VHD, VHDX, etc) to perform its' duties.
Read full review Support Rating The support is great when you get an engineer that knows what they are doing but getting that individual sometimes takes a while. Overall, they are professional and polite and competent in their knowledge. Sometimes the cases are open for an extended period of time which becomes very frustrating when dealing with critical issues.
Read full review Hyper-V is greatly supported by techs around the world. There are tons of forums, help websites and individuals ready to answer questions. I've never needed to contact Microsoft for help...because help is so easy to find out there. Do a search online for anything related to Hyper-V and you will certainly find an article with spelled out steps on how to do what you are looking to do.
Read full review In-Person Training I was self trained
Read full review We had in person training from a third party and while it was very in depth it was at a beginner's level and by the time we received the training we had advanced past this level so it was monotonous and redundant at that point. It was good training though and would have provided a solid foundation for learning the rest of Hyper-V had I had it from the beginning.
Read full review Online Training Easy to understand and learn at my own pace
Read full review The training was easy to read and find. There were good examples in the training and it is plentiful if you use third party resources also. It is not perfect as sometimes you may have a specific question and have to spend time learning or in the rare case you get an error you might have to research that error code which could have multiple causes.
Read full review Implementation Rating Take it slow and read the directions each step of the way. If you are not familiar with Citrix products, use a reseller or other experienced engineer to assist you in the setup of your environment
Read full review initial configuration of hyper-v is intuitive to anyone familiar with windows and roles for basic items like single server deployments, storage and basic networking. the majority of the problems were with implementing advanced features like high availability and more complex networking. There is a lot of documentation on how to do it but it is not seamless, even to experienced virtualization professionals.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I never had the chance to test other products like these since whenever I read and searched online during the first phase it was only popping up Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.... so we got in touch with the sales department and the rest is history. After the technical consultation, it was more obvious that the implementation would have been very easy and the security layers are very well for my company.
Read full review VMware is the pioneer of virtualization but when you compare it with Hyper-V, VMware lacks the flexibility of hardware customization and configuration options Hyper-V has also GPU virtualization still not adequate for both platforms. VMware has better graphical interface and control options for virtual machines. Another advantage VMware has is it does not need a dedicated os GUI base installation only needs small resources and can easily install on any host.
Read full review Scalability Easily scalable
Read full review Nothing is perfect but Hyper-V does a great job of showing the necessary data to users to ensure that there is enough resources to perform essential functions. You can also select what fields show on the management console which is helpful for a quick glance. There are notifications that can be set up and if things go unnoticed and a Hyper-V server runs out of a resource it will safely and quickly shut down the VM's it needs to in order to ensure no Hardware failure or unnecessary data loss.
Read full review Return on Investment XenApp has allowed us to continue support of legacy applications and all access of those applications to users across the globe with any device. XenApp can also manage software licenses by restricting number of users, number of concurrent sessions, or combination of both to required specification. While initial investment in XenApp can be costly, continuing support and upgrade are very cost effective and product stability is excellent. While there are competing products from Microsoft and VMware, when it comes to remote application access, XenApp is the best of breed. Read full review Hyper-V has provided for an extremely cost-effective virtual environment with disaster recovery. For the size of our business, it's all we need to ensure our desired level of continuity of services and protection against hardware failures. Since we are a Windows shop, deploying Hyper-V means we don't have the added cost of a hypervisor, since it's included in the cost of the Windows Server license. It's all we needed to achieve our goal of running all our virtual machines on a single server with another, less expensive server on tap for replication and failover. We wanted easy deployment and management with disaster recovery while having the ability to leverage our years of Windows SysAdmin experience. Hyper-V fit the bill. Read full review ScreenShots