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 solution integrates well with other solutions, which makes it really strong as a primary solution to deploy."
"The compatibility of the solution is its most valuable feature. It's compatible on almost every cloud these days."
"The onboarding process is pretty straightforward."
"I find it very easy to manage and at a cost that small customers would never refuse (free)."
"Citrix Hypervisor is simple to use."
"It is quite flexible and rugged. It is also easy to understand and user-friendly. It is not as complicated as some of the other solutions. It has its technicalities, but it is easy to understand. You can easily pick up in a short period of time and understand how to manage the infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is very fast. It also works very well for physically small servers."
"This is a good product for virtualization and it is easy to use."
"The solution is very straightforward to implement."
"The solution allows for very good virtualization."
"The feature that I find very valuable is the ability to move images of virtual machines from different workspaces to other workspaces between different installations."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the overall good ease of use and the good interface which makes it very easy to migrate from one bare metal to another. These are the two things which I like about it."
"VMware vSphere is a stable platform. We never had any issues with VMware vSphere. Once you deploy it with a stable version of the server or the hardware, there's no issue at all."
"Technical support was helpful and knowledgeable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is vMotion."
"Provides good backup to our servers."
"Network management needs improvement because it is not very stable."
"The interface has to be updated."
"The self-service user portal needs to be more granular and be more customizable."
"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."
"The solution is too expensive and people are kind of moving away from Citrix. It's starting to become a problem. It is a primary reason that while we are rebuilding we're going to seek out open-source solutions."
"Live migration is something that can be improved."
"The USB support for the virtual server needs improvement."
"The solution is only in English. It would be ideal if it was in Portuguese."
"The support is good, but it's slow."
"I would like to start to using NSX in the next release."
"Pricing is starting to get a little high-end."
"The HR proxy is actually a little bit tricky to install and setup."
"Generally, the user interface needs to be improved for non-technical people."
"In addition, I think some of the backup features or the prediction features can be improved."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"It is expensive. They can improve the licensing cost for Cloud Director. They can also improve the integration with other applications and the metering feature, which is currently not flexible."
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