XenServer

Score8.2 out of 10

76 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for XenServer are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

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.

Reviews

12 Reviews

A cost effective host for your Citrix environment!

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

January 6, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use XenServer as the hostserver for our Citrix VM's. We use XenServer instead of VMware for these machines because XenServer allows us to use GPU's without extra licensing costs. Other than that it also makes sure all of the Citrix resource load is on our Xen farm instead of VMware farm.

Pros

Free use of GPU's
Integrates well with the other Citrix products

Cons

Logging of tasks and events
Performance overview history

Likelihood to Recommend

I would definitely recommend using XenServer if we want or need to use GPU's for your Citrix farm but don't want to buy a Enterprise Plus license for your VMware environment. It also integrates very well with the rest of the Citrix products if you are using those. It also has less CVE's than vmware.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Citrix Hypervisor: Empowering Efficient Virtualization and Disaster Recovery.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

June 26, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Host Virtual Desktops.
Application Virtualization is much easier.
Scalability & Flexibility.

Cons

Resource pools are not reliable.
No provision for automated desktop creation.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Arvind Kumar

System Specialist in Information Technology at Admiral India (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

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Citrix Hypervisor Review

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 16, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

The free version is a boon for small businesses that want to have a hypervisor but not the headaches of using something that requires licensing. It is more than adequate to compete with the lesser versions of Hyper-V or VMware. Any small business that wants to lessen its hardware footprint could benefit from this product. If you are a medium or large business it is also a nice addition to the cupboard if you already use other Citrix products and are familiar with the Citrix support process. Shops that are fully committed to VMWare or MS Hyper-V should probably avoid this as it would just act to dilute your system and add unneeded complexity. Citrix Hypervisor is not most common Hardware Hypervisor on the market but it is more than competent for most Enterprise Deployments.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

A Decent Choice

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

July 1, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Citrix Hypervisor is well suited for quickly standing up a virtualized environment. As the environment scales, there is less efficiency within the platform, however. The partnership with Microsoft seems strong, but that also limits the product in the end. If other partnerships were as in depth as Citrix with MS products, it would greatly enhance the overall score. I would not recommend this product if you need to virtualize a large, complex system.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Virtualization is easy with Citrix

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 24, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Good scalability.
The ease of setup.
Very good integration with other tools.
The support from the vendor is very good.

Cons

The interface can be more user-friendly.
Model the management of clustering.
Use DDK to compile drivers.

Likelihood to Recommend

Virtualization of all infrastructures helps us to manage well our resources. Load balancing helps us to assure great availability and be compliant with business continuity indicators. Also, the solution offers great security and allows for rapid provisioning and flexible hardware utilization. It solves our problem by allowing users to connect to their machine at work no matter where they are currently.

Verified User

Supervisor in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Citrix Hypervisor was built for Citrix VDI

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 3, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's extremely easy to install, use, and maintain. They offer a free hypervisor that has a lot of great features that are only found with paid versions of competitors products. If you are using Citrix for your VDI solution you can compliment things with a Citrix hypervisor.

Scott McGee

Information Technology Manager in Information Technology at Hampden Township (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

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XenServer and modern virtualization

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 28, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

XenServer is well suited for all scenarios for deployment for a modern infrastructure. The weak link it has is of course for classic physical hardware that has key fobs or other telephony cards which aren't properly supported in a virtualized environment. Even if you have one physical server, virtualizing is the best practice to do.

Kristopher Leslie

IT Director in Information Technology at The Dannon Project (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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XenServer is Awesome!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 24, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

Disaster recovery is difficult to use

Likelihood to Recommend

For a company that has multiple servers with limited technical support. Xenserver can easily be supported remotely.

Evelyn Nakibuuka

Systems Administrator in Information Technology at St.Paul Stamp Works (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Open source hypervisor, free license and advanced features

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

November 23, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Xenserver is a great hypervisor, with advanced features, open-source and free. This is possible by support from Citrix. It works perfectly in cloud environments and standalone systems. If you need to create an environment to execute virtual machines to scientific processing, XenServer is well suited. However, we are having difficulty managing environments that demand high disk I/O and net I/O too. In this case, Hyper-V and ESxi work better.

Stênio Pereira Filho

Senior System Analyst in Information Technology at Universidade de São Paulo (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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XenServer Vs ?

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 16, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Low cost. Support is much cheaper than the alternatives.
Much simpler to implement and manage than other hypervisors.
Good performance on all the VMs.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have the money to throw at the best-of-breed it may be better to go with VMWare. Its more widely used.

Greg DePratt

IT Manager in Information Technology at Pitsco Education (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

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