Citrix Hypervisor Review
May 16, 2021

Citrix Hypervisor Review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer)

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.
  • We use the free version to host a small test bed of virtual boxes. Not having to pay for a solution is a great benefit.
  • We are a Citrix shop (Xenapp/Virtual apps) so having another Citrix product is not an issue for our technical skill set.
  • The ability to live migrate servers between nodes allows us to do patching without downtime. This feature is a great benefit to both lower user notifications and IT off hours time.
In the scheme of the real world, Citrix Hypervisor is used much less than the other two main competing products; MS Hyper-V and VMWare vSphere. So, choosing Citrix Hypervisor for your organization comes down to whether you are comfortable going with a lesser-used product. All 3 products offer hardware layered hypervisor installation which means no OS overhead headaches. That is usually positive but in some cases, with very small shops, the OS layer is needed to host other workloads so Hyper-V running on Windows is the better choice. We run both MS Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor and we chose the Citrix product for our testbed environment since any risk of running the less public supported product was lessened by not being in full production.

Do you think XenServer delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with XenServer's feature set?

Yes

Did XenServer live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of XenServer go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy XenServer again?

Yes

Hyper-V, vSphere, Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), Lucidpress, WordPress, Veeam Backup & Replication, Windows Server Failover Clustering, Microsoft Exchange
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.

XenServer Feature Ratings

Virtual machine automated provisioning
8
Management console
9
Live virtual machine backup
9
Live virtual machine migration
9
Hypervisor-level security
8