Open source hypervisor, free license and advanced features
November 23, 2016

Open source hypervisor, free license and advanced features

Stênio Pereira Filho | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with XenServer

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 easy to learn. We paid for support only for installation and deployment in the first three years, and now our team has the knowledge to solve most problems.
  • Low CAPEX if you have a team that uses open source software day by day.
  • But paid support is necessary to solve critical problems. The open source community is not enough. Actually, we have difficulty solving some bugs without paying for support.
  • Medium OPEX if you have a team that uses open source software day by day.
There are other hypervisors that are more eficient than Xenserver, but it is necessary to spend some money to buy them. If your demand is to compute processing, Xenserver permits you to create good environments to do this. If you need to integrate the hypervisor with other software solutions and hardware, Hyper-V and VMware ESXi have better support.
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.

XenServer Feature Ratings

Virtual machine automated provisioning
10
Management console
7
Live virtual machine backup
7
Live virtual machine migration
9
Hypervisor-level security
9

Using XenServer

3000 - scientific researchers, administrative employees
8 - IT professional with experience in Linux, virtualization, networking and patience. knowledge in troubleshooting by analyzing log files.
  • Scientific processing
  • Optimization of IT resource usage
  • Agility in the IT resource allocation process
  • Provide virtual desktops in the cloud computing