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Organizations have found XenServer to be a valuable alternative to VMWare ESXi, allowing them to consolidate their physical servers and …
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What is XenServer?
XenServer (formerly Citrix Hypervisor) is a virtualization management platform optimized for application, desktop and server virtualization infrastructures.
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Popular Features
- Live virtual machine migration (11)9.090%
- Live virtual machine backup (10)8.080%
- Management console (11)5.050%
- Virtual machine automated provisioning (10)2.020%
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What is XenServer?
XenServer (formerly Citrix Hypervisor) is a virtualization management platform optimized for application, desktop and server virtualization infrastructures.
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What is XenServer?
XenServer (formerly Citrix Hypervisor) is a virtualization management platform optimized for application, desktop and server virtualization infrastructures.
XenServer Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
XenServer (formerly Citrix Hypervisor) is a virtualization management platform optimized for application, desktop and server virtualization infrastructures.
Reviewers rate Live virtual machine migration and Hypervisor-level security highest, with a score of 9.
The most common users of XenServer are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Recommendations
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.
Users frequently recommend Citrix Hypervisor as a reliable alternative to VMWare for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop. They find it well-suited for small and medium-scale deployments, making it a cost-effective choice. It is also recommended to thoroughly check compatibility with other programs before implementing Citrix Hypervisor to ensure seamless integration and avoid any potential glitches. Additionally, Citrix Hypervisor is praised for its ease of deployment and setup, particularly suitable for small businesses. Users also suggest considering Citrix Hypervisor for organizations with remote or mobile staff, as it enables convenient access to tools from home or on the go. Finally, Citrix XenServer is mentioned as a good choice for in-house use, contributing to reducing infrastructure costs.
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(1-11 of 11)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
We are using VDI infrastructure which is hosted on Citrix XenServer. All of our Virtual Desktop environments are being created and managed on Citrix hypervisors. The business problems it addresses: Server Consolidation, Flexibility & Scalability, Disaster Recovery, Cost Reduction, etc. The scope of the use case may vary depending on the organization's specific requirements. It can range from small-scale deployments for individual departments or teams to large-scale enterprise deployments spanning multiple data centers.
- Host Virtual Desktops.
- Application Virtualization is much easier.
- Scalability & Flexibility.
- Resource pools are not reliable.
- No provision for automated desktop creation.
May 16, 2021
Citrix Hypervisor Review
We use Citrix Hypervisor to stand up virtual servers based on a single piece of hardware. It allows us to get the maximum benefit from the hardware by parsing out its resources across several different virtual servers saving us money in licensing, hardware needs, and power needs in our data center.
- 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.
- Although part of this is free the free solution has limitations that make the purchase of the paid version a requirement for most medium and large enterprises.
- Support for USB devices is lacking vs. its competitors.
- Technical support is somewhat limited especially the free "Google browsing" type since the product is used much less vs. Hyper-V or VMWARE.
- In a related issue to tech support, finding local IT support who have used the product is also challenging.
- Networking/virtual networks are less stable than they should be.
July 01, 2019
A Decent Choice
We use Citrix Hypervisor as one of our virtualization tools. The ability to run multiple VMs on each physical server has been beneficial. As one of the leading virtualization management platforms, it offers many great features out of the box. The ability to quickly set up and configure and easily managed environment are among a few of the positives. It's not the most robust and feature packed, but it's cheap and relatively simple to use.
- Creating VMS - virtualizing physical or already virtual images is a snap
- Configuration - in a smaller environment, configuration is simple and easy to understand
- Templates and Clones - the ability to create these on the fly make it great for a dev environment
- Support - if free is what you need, great support is not what you'll get, keep in mind if support is necessary
- Upgrades - the upgrade process is buggy and problematic at best
- Partner Support - if you're looking for a product with multiple parters rolled in, I'd look elsewhere
May 24, 2019
Virtualization is easy with Citrix
Citrix Hypervisor is a perfect virtualization solution which allows many functions, among which scalability has the main function. The architecture offers a combination of remote desktop services and web interface servers. Implementation and change management are complex. The cost is very good. The project requires long term vision and lots of planning. Also, you need a good team to implement such a big project.
- Good scalability.
- The ease of setup.
- Very good integration with other tools.
- The support from the vendor is very good.
- The interface can be more user-friendly.
- Model the management of clustering.
- Use DDK to compile drivers.
April 03, 2019
Citrix Hypervisor was built for Citrix VDI
We utilize Citrix Hypervisor as our sole hypervisor in our entire Citrix environment. This has helped us reduce our hardware expenses by over 75% with virtualizing all of our production servers. We were on a 3 year replacement plan when we had physical production servers but now we get 5-7 years on our hypervisor servers. Because it's an existing Citrix product we do not have to work with multiple vendors if there is ever a software issue.
- The install is incredibly easy. Even version upgrades require minimal effort to accomplish.
- The dynamic storage capabilities are great. If a server runs low on disk space we can increase the drive space in minutes instead of waiting days for new drives to arrive and the time to physically shut down the server to add them.
- A lot of software vendors only support VMWare and Hyper-V as acceptable hypervisors for their products.
- It lacks the ability to truly upscale memory in a live environment.
September 28, 2017
XenServer and modern virtualization
Our organization utilized XenServer to replace VMware ESXi. We have consolidated all physical servers to just 3 hypervisors and manage the environment with XoA. We currently have 30 VMs running in our infrastructure. We utilize Windows 2016 and 2012 R2 along with a few instances of Linux. Each department uses an individual server which has improved the speed and delivery of IT services to our staff.
- Resource Monitoring is a good and I am able to monitor my entire infrastructure whether I'm using my iPhone remotely or while on any company-issued laptop to ensure our services run at peak efficiency.
- CLI - the command line is not hard to use. It can take a little time to get used to the commands but once you have them down managing the environment from the GUI or CLI is pretty easy.
- Backups are very easy to start and manage with XenCenter or XoA. Keeping business DR scenarios achievable.
- Better support for USB devices (which is a weak point of most Hypervisors)
- More native iPhone/Android apps to monitor the environment
- Better reports for an insight of how healthy the environment is
March 24, 2017
XenServer is Awesome!
XenServer is used for the whole organisation and hosts all the companies VM's. It is very helpful to manage and troubleshoot all existing servers. It provides capabilities to monitor all servers. Creating new VM's using XenServer is seemingly very easy for the process is straight forward and one can easily follow through.
- Provides visibility of all the VM's and one can tell when any of the server's are offline.
- The functionality to re-boot a VM is easy and quick
- It is secure and can be accessed remotely.
- Disaster recovery is difficult to use
November 23, 2016
Open source hypervisor, free license and advanced features
We are using Xenserver as the principal hypervisor of our private cloud that offers infrastructure as a service to the academic community of the University of Sao Paulo and other public institutes of Brazil. This private cloud has 480 servers (9800 CPUs, 5TB RAM, 15PB storage) and it is used for scientific processing and many other services like web services, email systems, a social collaboration systems.
- Free advanced resources: Live migration, live storage migration, snapshots, open switch/vxlan. Others hypervisors offer the same but are paid.
- It is fully compatible with CloudStack and OpenStack.
- Supports paravirtualization (PVM) and hardware virtual machines (HVM).
- It is open-source and easy to troubleshoot.
- The snapshots management still presents problems, especially in environments with several virtual machines.
- The virtual memory management is still weak if compared with other hypervisors.
- There isn't a central server for the management of physical hosts. XenCenter is a client that is not good because it demands so much memory and CPU to execute simple tasks in environments with several VMs.
February 23, 2016
XenServer: room for improvement
XenServer is one of the products used for teaching a virtualization class.
- Create virtual machine
- Xenmotion
- Config/installation of XenServer
- Lacks management tool equivalent to vCenter server. XenCenter is a client-side app only.
- Lack official support for work load balancing (the support has been dropped)
February 12, 2016
XenServer reviewed by an avid Citrix and VDI engineer
The XenServer workloads I have set up and currently provide are primarily for clients. These workloads cover anything from an IT lab, VDI and Server workloads for the entire data center. It is a mixed use hypervisor in most environments where it is placed for a purpose (such as VDI) at a cost savings and management supplement due to its ease of use.
- Manages upgrades to the pool of hypervisor hosts with relative ease through a console (if licensed).
- Makes it easy to create machine templates and clones and move them around within the pool of hosts.
- Handles failures reasonably well through the use of the pool database copied on each host
- 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.
October 16, 2015
XenServer Vs ?
We are using XenServer for all our virtualization of servers company-wide. It allows us to leverage our hardware and run multiple VMs on each physical server.
- Low cost. Support is much cheaper than the alternatives.
- Much simpler to implement and manage than other hypervisors.
- Good performance on all the VMs.
- Front line support form off shore has been challenging lately. Need a better escalation path for issues.
- Upgrades can be difficult at times. Not always super smooth.