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."
"We find there are good central maintenance and central management panels."
"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."
"Citrix Hypervisor is quick to deploy and easy to manage."
"This is a good product for virtualization and it is easy to use."
"What I find most valuable in Citrix Hypervisor is its licensing policy, because you'll get it for free if you buy a Citrix XenDesktop license. You don't need to spend additional money on the Citrix Hypervisor because you can manage both the Citrix XenDesktop and the Citrix Hypervisor with just one license, so you can save on cost. I also like that the solution is good support-wise. Hardware support is also faster compared to other solutions."
"The most valuable features are being able to host many virtual machines and being able to patch machines."
"I find it very easy to manage and at a cost that small customers would never refuse (free)."
"Valuable features really depend on different projects. We are using the traditional infrastructure based on VMware vSphere. We are also using the high availability (HA) and Distributed Switch features to extend our network and switch between different hosts. The VMotion and SVMotion features are very essential for us to relocate the storage of virtual machines to different storage or vSANs. We are using VMotion and SVMotion features several times of the day. We are also using another VMware product to replicate a lot of solutions to a second replication site."
"This solution's most valuable feature is its High Availability."
"The benefit of the solution is that you can create template-based servers within minutes. If you were to use a physical server, it would probably take several hours, if not a whole day, to get everything set up the way you need."
"It's very transparent and independent."
"The most valuable features are the virtualization and the performance on the virtualization platform."
"The most valuable features of VMware vSphere are backup and recovery."
"I use the ESXi a lot for my users to create their own templates and control their own VMs without my interaction."
"The VMware community is always there and it is a valuable resource."
"The solution needs better backup facilities that are available for virtual machines to create servers on."
"Assigning the order of virtual server startup is not very easy and this can be improved."
"Live migration is something that can be improved."
"Integration with other vendors and other applications could be improved."
"The self-service user portal needs to be more granular and be more customizable."
"I find that the features in Citrix Hypervisor are not as rich as with VMware. It would be a benefit if they had some of the other features VMware has, such as the ability to expand a drive on the fly. You do not have to take down the machine to do it but in Citrix you do."
"Citrix is not investing in the virtual surroundings."
"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."
"The technical support could improve by being a little faster."
"It would be highly beneficial for VMware to collaborate with local hosts and partners in countries like those in Africa to establish specific pricing that would align with the economic conditions of countries in Africa, ensuring suitability and compatibility with our consumption capabilities."
"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."
"Response time could be improved."
"I would like to see AI in future releases."
"They should make it more efficient and stable."
"We've been using vSphere on Windows 7, and it had less fluff associated with ThinApp. Currently, with Windows 10 version that we have, it adds a lot of bulk to ThinApp. We have offices spanning across Canada from the east coast to the west coast. A ThinApp that is roughly around 400 MB in size would take minutes to open up. With Windows 7, the same ThinApp used to be close to 75 to 80 MB in size. So, I'm really not happy with the extra fluff that is bundled in Windows 10. It really messes things up for us at times."
"There is definitely room for improvement and that improvement should be in the licensing and the simplicity of procuring additional licenses or additional VMware products. Right now, it's very complex."
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