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XenServer

XenServer
Formerly Citrix Hypervisor

Overview

What is XenServer?

XenServer (formerly Citrix Hypervisor) is a virtualization management platform optimized for application, desktop and server virtualization infrastructures.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Organizations have found XenServer to be a valuable alternative to VMWare ESXi, allowing them to consolidate their physical servers and …
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A Decent Choice

6 out of 10
July 01, 2019
Incentivized
We use Citrix Hypervisor as one of our virtualization tools. The ability to run multiple VMs on each physical server has been beneficial. …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Popular Features

View all 5 features
  • Live virtual machine migration (11)
    9.0
    90%
  • Live virtual machine backup (10)
    8.0
    80%
  • Management console (11)
    5.0
    50%
  • Virtual machine automated provisioning (10)
    2.0
    20%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Unavailable

What is XenServer?

XenServer (formerly Citrix Hypervisor) is a virtualization management platform optimized for application, desktop and server virtualization infrastructures.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Features

Server Virtualization

Server virtualization allows multiple operating systems to be run completely independently on a single server

6.6
Avg 8.3
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Product Details

What is XenServer?

XenServer (formerly Citrix Hypervisor) is a virtualization management platform optimized for application, desktop and server virtualization infrastructures.

XenServer Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(74)

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!

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.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-6 of 6)
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July 01, 2019

A Decent Choice

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
Stênio Pereira Filho | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
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.
I feel XenServer is well suited for VDI based workloads at least within the Citrix product portfolio as it is extremely easy to set up and manage. It is also a reasonably well suited platform for smaller data centers which require less complexity and monitoring. Workloads requiring the usage of shared GPU are well suited for XenServer.

The product is less well suited for large enterprise data centers. However, new versions are bringing features to allow the hypervisor to contend. Complex virtual networking environments may not be well suited for XenServer.
October 16, 2015

XenServer Vs ?

Greg DePratt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
If you have the money to throw at the best-of-breed it may be better to go with VMWare. Its more widely used.
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