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.
"Citrix Hypervisor does a great job overall, such as the virtualization of the host. It's very easy to manage the virtual machine, to create, and configure high availability."
"The feature I find most valuable, is its performance"
"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."
"We can easily migrate VMs from one host to another."
"The continued uptime of our virtual machines is good."
"The compatibility of the solution is its most valuable feature. It's compatible on almost every cloud these days."
"This is a dependable solution for virtualization with a good community for product support."
"The VMware community is always there and it is a valuable resource."
"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."
"The speed of the solution is excellent."
"VMware vSphere has very good applications and services."
"It's a very useful solution. It's easy to set up, and it's pretty stable."
"It is a very dependable solution. Its performance is very good, and it is also easy to manage and implement."
"An easy way of providing near-zero downtime services, the operation of the instances between clustered services, and providing the projected SLA for our customers."
"We can slide in new resources without any impact. We can do maintenance on our clusters without any impact to applications, and we have the flexibility of migrating those workloads to other data centers, when required, in the case of data center downtime."
"Assigning the order of virtual server startup is not very easy and this can be improved."
"It needs improvement with the security features."
"The interface has to be updated."
"I think the technical support could be better."
"Overall, I can't think of a feature that is lacking. We've been pretty satisfied overall."
"Network management needs improvement because it is not very stable."
"There are several areas that need improvement including the stability of the networking stack and networking management."
"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 could be cheaper and less expensive."
"We need to improve availability and disaster recovery in VMware vSphere."
"Where I think there is room for improvement is in the HTML5 interface in vCenter. What it lacks, for me, is integrating to VMware's other products, especially NSX."
"I think the pricing could be lower, and the technical support could be improved."
"As far as the web client goes, one of the frustrating things is that it's dependent on different browsers. One day it may work with only a given browser or there may be issues with Flash. So I look forward to being able to use the HTML 5 client."
"Archiving, exporting, and backing up need to be improved for this solution, because they're slower than expected."
"The biggest issue with stability is the SSO. That is still an issue as far as integrating it with Active Directory, and any large scale of it."
"It could use a smaller learning curve."
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