XenServer

Formerly Citrix Hypervisor

Organizations have found XenServer to be a valuable alternative to VMWare ESXi, allowing them to consolidate their physical servers and manage their environment efficiently with XoA. Users have reported improved speed and delivery of IT services by utilizing individual servers for each department. Additionally, XenServer is widely used as a host for VDI infrastructure, enabling the creation and management of virtual desktop environments.

XenServer addresses various business problems, including server consolidation, flexibility and scalability, disaster recovery, and cost reduction. The scope of use cases for XenServer can range from small-scale deployments for individual departments or teams to large-scale enterprise deployments spanning multiple data centers. For example, the University of Sao Paulo and other public institutes in Brazil rely on XenServer as the principal hypervisor for their private cloud, offering infrastructure as a service to the academic community.

Citrix Hypervisor, another name for XenServer, is often used as the sole hypervisor in entire Citrix environments, reducing hardware expenses and providing virtualization for production servers. It allows organizations to leverage their hardware resources efficiently by running multiple virtual machines on each physical server, resulting in cost savings related to licensing, hardware, and power needs. Users appreciate the ease of use and straightforwardness when creating new VMs with XenServer.

In addition to these use cases, Citrix Hypervisor offers scalability and a combination of remote desktop services and web interface servers. However, it is important to note that implementing and managing this product require long-term vision, planning, and a competent team. Nonetheless, XenServer has proven beneficial for teaching virtualization classes and setting up workloads for clients encompassing IT labs, VDI environments, and server workloads.