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.
"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 Hypervisor integrates easily and I can manage the infrastructure better. If I need to take a machine down to expand the hard drive, I do not have to physically be here. I do not need to order new equipment or new hard drives. I can shut it down, increase the drive space and bring it back up."
"We find there are good central maintenance and central management panels."
"We can easily migrate VMs from one host to another."
"The most valuable features are being able to host many virtual machines and being able to patch machines."
"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 solution allows the end users to clone, start, stop, or remotely control their VMs."
"It provides a new environment in an expedient manner."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is vMotion."
"I use customization to prevent any network and DNS collisions to the router."
"The tool provides 99.99% uptime."
"I don't see any challenges in using this product."
"We have the possibility to move workloads to different locations."
"You don't need too many people to manage the solution once it's up and running."
"The tool makes virtualization easy. It was free, and we could profit from its GUI. It helps to manage VMs easily."
"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."
"The self-service user portal needs to be more granular and be more customizable."
"There are several areas that need improvement including the stability of the networking stack and networking management."
"The solution should be more flexible and allow for greater customization."
"I think the technical support could be better."
"The interface has to be updated."
"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."
"Overall, I can't think of a feature that is lacking. We've been pretty satisfied overall."
"In the past, little changes have broken things in vSphere. Going from 6.0, which worked perfectly fine on the Mac Pro, there were certain changes in hardware drivers, when 6.5 came out. Some were no longer present or had been deprecated. As a result, it didn't work on the Mac Pro anymore, which was business critical."
"As we continue to push mission-critical workloads into vSphere, and those workloads are not readily protected at the application layer for availability, continuing to increase the size limitations on FT-protected VMs would be a great advance."
"The solution could improve by having more integration."
"The way that vSphere manages the alerts on the data machine is not easy to configure."
"It lacks a snapshot feature."
"I'm using vSphere at a high level. Sometimes, I find it challenging to integrate different networks, but I think it's just my lack of knowledge."
"It's inherently complex. Operating a large virtual infrastructure is not an easy task for anyone."
"The one area where I would love to see an improvement is the HTML5 client. It's great, but it could get better."
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