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.
"Ability to move your virtual machines from one host to another."
"Citrix is easy to use and is stable."
"The most valuable features are being able to host many virtual machines and being able to patch machines."
"The solution is extremely user friendly."
"What I like the most is the support of the GPU Graphics and the VM Live migration."
"The initial setup is easy."
"This is a good product for virtualization and it is easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is very fast. It also works very well for physically small servers."
"It cuts down on hardware costs by being able to virtualize multiple hardware and multiple machines on a single piece of hardware."
"The pricing of the product is reasonable."
"Ease-of-Use; The solution is very simple to use and to manage. Updates are simple. The biggest feature that enables the ease of use is the fact that you can update via the web interface. With a couple of clicks, the update is done; no manual intervention, you just click Update and it automatically reboots the server for you and you're back up and going again."
"The most important feature is the ability to balance the servers with Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). It is a very useful feature and should be mandatory for vSphere to have but it is only available in the enterprise edition. It should be available in all versions."
"vSphere does offer quite a bit of security stuff built-in. It is nice to know that we can have the virtual machines encrypted, so that if somebody were to get a hold of any of those files, we don't have to worry about them actually being used."
"It is a very stable solution. It performs well for our requirements. It has been running for a long time, so we are very knowledgeable about this solution. It is a very well-supported solution, and it is very flexible. The expansion of its functionality is dynamic."
"Technical support is quite good and very responsive."
"The solution is also very simple and efficient to manage. Features that have made it simple and easy to manage include the newer VAMI for the V-center appliance, it's very easy to see what version we are at, and very easy to upgrade to the next version. The fact that we can now use VCHA at the appliance level just decreases our chance of having an outage because so many of our customers rely on the API interface for V-center."
"Citrix Hypervisor is expensive if you get it as a stand-alone product, so this is one area for improvement. Its price could be cheaper. We also found other areas for improvement in Citrix Hypervisor, for example, we can't use SCIM provisioning, and there are limitations to the size of the HDD. Another area for improvement is the pass-through storage, in particular the removable storage, because that also has limitations where you can't connect to the drive if it is more than one TB."
"The solution would benefit from faster technical support."
"Citrix could provide more tools to help the client manage the solution because we need to build our own tools in some cases. Everything is available through PowerShell, but then you need to build your own scripts to do the more advanced work."
"Live migration is something that can be improved."
"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."
"We'd like them to add more automation to the product."
"Citrix is not investing in the virtual surroundings."
"The licensing costs are too high on the solution. They should work to make the costs more reasonable."
"vSphere itself is great when you don't need to make updates, but any time you have to touch it, unfortunately it's always the little bit of a fight to get it to do what you want."
"Archiving, exporting, and backing up need to be improved for this solution, because they're slower than expected."
"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."
"An improvement could be allowing a "dark mode" for the interface. I think the HTML5 client is a little bit hard to read. It's all white. It's a little bit bright on the eyes. A lot of us IT guys view in the dark."
"The only improvement that is needed that come to mind are improvements in the vRealize Automation and vRealize Operations management simplicity."
"It would be nice to see it a little more tightly integrated with the patching solution so you could do it in one pane of glass. Right now, you have to jump back and forth. It's still not difficult, but you have to jump back and forth to do your update definitions and then go back and actually do the updates themselves."
"The support for VMware vSphere can be fast or it can be slow. Recently it has been slow, they need to decrease the wait time and quality of their support."
"The installation can take a long time, they need to improve on the simplicity and length of the installation."
Citrix Hypervisor is ranked 8th in Server Virtualization Software with 8 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 14 reviews. Citrix Hypervisor is rated 8.2, while VMware vSphere is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Citrix Hypervisor writes "An easy-to-use solution with virtualization features that helped during lockdown". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSphere writes "Offers a suite of software components for virtualization including ESXi, vCenter Server, and other software". Citrix Hypervisor is most compared with Proxmox VE, Hyper-V, Oracle VM VirtualBox, KVM 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 http://www.citrix.com/products.html?posit=glnav 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