We performed a comparison between Citrix Hypervisor and VMware vSphere based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Citrix Hypervisor wins out in this comparison. The main difference between the two solutions is that VMware vSphere is more expensive than Citrix Hypervisor and users say it also needs improved security and monitoring features.
"The feature I find most valuable, is its performance"
"The solution is extremely user friendly."
"Ability to move your virtual machines from one host to another."
"The solution's security is its most valuable aspect."
"I've found the following features to be the most valuable: user personalization layer, app layering, provisioning, and notification services for integration between different domains."
"This is a dependable solution for virtualization with a good community for product support."
"What I like the most is the support of the GPU Graphics and the VM Live migration."
"We can easily migrate VMs from one host to another."
"Scalability is the big advantage of it. The product itself allows us to scale on the fly as we need it, and plan for the future."
"The solution is very scalable."
"Its stability and manageability are valuable."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"The enterprise direction is very complete and the data center provides almost everything you need."
"Its DR facility is good. Within a moment, data can be retrieve from another physical location over the Internet. The speed to recover data is good."
"VMware Tanzu (container) is the most valuable addition because you get an efficient solution to manage the VM and container in a single pane of glass."
"The most valuable feature of vSphere is its modularity. I also like the maturity updates. It's available everywhere and almost all the data centers are using it."
"It needs to have a more robust backup solution."
"I think the technical support could be better."
"The main problem with Citrix Hypervisor is getting readily available backup solutions for it. It would be wonderful if Hypervisor were better integrated with third-party backup solutions."
"It can be useful to have a web management program because we have to install our client-server. We have to properly manage the host, if we had administration tools through a web interface it would be a benefit."
"Network management needs improvement because it is not very stable."
"You need a licensed account to look up technical support."
"The graphics user interface is pretty bad."
"There are several areas that need improvement including the stability of the networking stack and networking management."
"I'd like to see a little bit more integration for VDI. I think that Composer servers, security servers, broker servers with connections, I'm not sure they are necessary at this point. Perhaps they could have a lot of those functions baked directly into the hypervisor. It seems to me that if the hypervisor is scalable and flexible enough, that the processor and compute can handle all of that. Maybe we eliminate those other components for VDIs and have more mixed workloads: server workloads and desktop workloads all in the same hypervisor."
"Although vSphere is a nearly perfect product, it does need a little improvement. Datacenter and Cluster structure should be mixed so that the management of clusters would be easier."
"The price could be better."
"The integration capabilities of the solution have certain shortcomings, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The setup is easy. However, the configuration expansion can be difficult. The full implementation took three to four days. This included the move from physical servers to virtual ones."
"The support is good, but it's slow."
"In terms of what could be improved, we do face some bugs when cloning the virtual machine - it fails sometimes."
"OS templates should be readily available, so there is no need to get an OS separately. Only the activation part should be different, which is not presently available due to the need to get the OS from a different location, then create VMs."
Citrix Hypervisor is ranked 8th in Server Virtualization Software with 45 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 446 reviews. Citrix Hypervisor is rated 8.2, while VMware vSphere is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Citrix Hypervisor writes "Good features, fair pricing, and excellent reliability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSphere writes "Offers good performance and is useful for banking systems". Citrix Hypervisor is most compared with Proxmox VE, Hyper-V, KVM, Oracle VM VirtualBox and Nutanix AHV Virtualization, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, VMware Workstation, Oracle VM and IBM PowerVM. See our Citrix Hypervisor vs. VMware vSphere report.
See our list of best Server Virtualization Software vendors.
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VMware and Citrix server virtualization do almost the same thing with nearly same options, on the other hand Citrix Xenapp and Xendesktop is far more advanced and efficient and have their own secured protocol. I've been using Citrix Xenapp for long time, it is an amazing solution saving huge cost related to communication channels and software license. Also I implemented Citrix Xenapp on VMware and HyperV. The stability of Citrix over VMware is far more better than over HyperV. We used the Citrix Xenapp to streaming Oracle EBS and Microsoft office to remote users (about 13000 user) it served up to 1600 concurrent user very efficient.
Hi,
VMware and Citrix XenServer both are Bare metal (Type1) Virtualization Software. Both are good. But VMware is too user friendly and good for Enterprise as well. Whereas, Citrix is good for SMB.
In short, there are so many options with each company that it is hard to provide a short sweet answer. From my experience, Citrix has been used primarily to enable one to access computers and systems remotely as well as a tool to enable folks to get together via an online meeting format. VMWare, conversely, has been used for virtual environments where one could host their servers, say up to 4 or 5 of them, virtually, on each ESXi host machine. Again, each company has many products, however I have thought of them as an apples verses oranges comparison in as far as the service/products they offer. One can explore Citrix products at www.citrix.com and VMWare products at http://www.vmware.com/products/.
-Jeff
Adding to Howard's points, you can virtualize NetScaler as well. It is now replacing Cisco's Load Balancing line of products. Citrix XenServer also allows for users to build their own Cloud.
As with Rakesh's comments, Citrix can provide some of same benefits.
1. Reduce physical space in the data center, thereby reducing physical server maintenance, cooling costs and OPEX.
2. Using templates, you can deploy virtual servers in hours instead of days or weeks with physical purchases.
3. With Desktop virtualization, Microsoft has VDA licensing. Server OS licensing remains the same.
Overall, both vendors have their own key points of expertise, it will depend on what you really want to accomplish with virtualization.
Which products specifically?
Haven't used citrix but had been useing VMWARE , I will therefore concentrate on VMware alone.
VMWare benefits on Multiple fronts
1. Reduce Physical Space of Data Center
2. Reduces Physical Server Maintenance Cost and thereby OPEX
3. Make implementing Redundancy much Easier
4. Servers are Up in Days compared to conventional methods where we needed to procure physical Servers
5. Reduce Energy Cost as we have reduced number of Physical Servers
6. Reduces Windows OS licensing cost
Adding to Howard's points above, VMware uses their existing Hypervisor platform to enable customers build their own Cloud too.
Vmware and Citrix both do similar things. They both offer server virtualization and desktop virtualization (plus other related software). VMware is the clear market leader for server virtualzation (Vsphere) and Citrix is the leader in desktop / application virtualization (Xendesktop / Xenapp). They both offer network software enhancements (and Citrix has NetScaler hardware). If you have any questions, please email howieb@hotmail.com