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 is simple to use."
"The compatibility of the solution is its most valuable feature. It's compatible on almost every cloud these days."
"The solution is extremely stable."
"The feature I find most valuable, is its performance"
"The most valuable features are being able to host many virtual machines and being able to patch machines."
"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 ability to move a virtual machine while it is running is a big advantage."
"The continued uptime of our virtual machines is good."
"We are able to patch our hosts during production hours with the ability to keep services running."
"We use it for our VDI infrastructure and managing virtual machines."
"The ability of a running VM to be quickly relocated to another hypervisor or launched at another site via replicated storage greatly reduces downtime."
"Very reliable with a great community."
"Since we have an internal cloud, suddenly people may require 1000 or 2000 VMS in something. We have options to analyze and make sure we have enough scalability."
"The web console is the most valuable feature for me. Because no matter what happens with the server, I can still get to it with the web console."
"The ability to create or clone a virtual environment in a short period of time for testing is most valuable."
"It has high clustering and availability features. These features are not found with other hypervisors."
"It needs improvement with the security features."
"The product could be faster and licensing options could be improved."
"The USB support for the virtual server needs improvement."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"You need a licensed account to look up technical support."
"It lacks a snapshot feature."
"They need to further develop graphics virtualization."
"I would like to see better fault and performance reporting in the GUI."
"Technical support is not that great. It is too slow."
"We stopped using a lot of cloud services. However, I see that VMware has integrated with Amazon Cloud. We will now to have to move everything to the cloud."
"The management could be simplified for base-level customers, but of course, it would be difficult to match all customer needs."
"Its price should be better. Their support should also be more customer-friendly, and they should train people like us so that we know more about the latest technologies and features. If there is some program and drive from their side to teach us, it is definitely going to help us. Pricing and support are the most important features for mid-level companies. We are not implementing this solution for big tech companies."
"The implementation of VMware vSphere is easy. For integration companies, it's easy, the final client cannot do it alone but for an implementor it's easy."
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