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.
"Installing Hypervisor is really simple. It's the simplest setup I've ever done before. We used a team to deploy it, and it doesn't take much time, like two or three hours tops."
"The solution is easy to deploy. It's very easy to understand problems and read logs."
"Citrix Hypervisor is quick to deploy and easy to manage."
"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."
"Citrix is easy to use and is stable."
"This is a good product for virtualization and it is easy to use."
"I find it very easy to manage and at a cost that small customers would never refuse (free)."
"The solution is extremely user friendly."
"The UI is very intuitive, you don't have to spend hours before you figure it out. All in all, compared to other environments, like Hyper-V, we find vSphere a lot more user-friendly and intuitive to use."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSphere is the ability to work in a big system infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to revert to previous snapshots during testing of various guest and application deployments."
"VMware vSphere is a very stable product."
"The VMware community is always there and it is a valuable resource."
"Technical support is very good. They are very helpful."
"Very reliable with a great community."
"The ability of a running VM to be quickly relocated to another hypervisor or launched at another site via replicated storage greatly reduces downtime."
"The solution should be more flexible and allow for greater customization."
"It needs improvement with the security features."
"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."
"Citrix is not investing in the virtual surroundings."
"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."
"The product could be faster and licensing options could be improved."
"The solution needs better backup facilities that are available for virtual machines to create servers on."
"Overall, I can't think of a feature that is lacking. We've been pretty satisfied overall."
"The HTML 5 client has always lagged behind."
"The reporting could be improved."
"Archiving, exporting, and backing up need to be improved for this solution, because they're slower than expected."
"The solution could benefit by expanding the CPUs and memory from different physical nodes."
"When we talk about the overall private cloud stack, I would prefer for it be a lot more seamless."
"VMware has amped up how frequently they release new versions and that adds instability to a stable environment."
"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."
"I would like to see AI in future releases."
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