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 quick to deploy and easy to manage."
"The continued uptime of our virtual machines is good."
"Citrix is easy to use and is stable."
"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 compatibility of the solution is its most valuable feature. It's compatible on almost every cloud these days."
"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."
"The price is the solution's most valuable feature."
"Scripting can automate procedures."
"VMware vSphere is user friendly. It is scalable and stable."
"The roadmap for the product itself covers all of the features that we are looking for."
"We are able to create virtual machines and move them from one host to another, controlling the resources."
"We've found the High Availability and flexibility to be important."
"vSphere brings the features required for an enterprise class system with a lot of supporting components: An intuitive user experience that simplifies and helps operational management."
"The fact that we have the ability to easily scale out, and the ability to do maintenance on the underlying hardware without impacting our business applications, are important aspects."
"The VMware community is always there and it is a valuable resource."
"The provisioning setup of VMs is good."
"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."
"You need a licensed account to look up technical support."
"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."
"It needs improvement with the security features."
"The interface has to be updated."
"Network management needs improvement because it is not very stable."
"The licensing costs are too high on the solution. They should work to make the costs more reasonable."
"The solution is only in English. It would be ideal if it was in Portuguese."
"It could use a smaller learning curve."
"There should be more stability in the updates. They had an issue with the last release."
"Sometimes you can't find items and you need to log onto different physical servers to do technical tasks. I don't fully understand why this is the case."
"Its cost needs to be improved. It is very expensive as compared to other solutions."
"It's inherently complex. Operating a large virtual infrastructure is not an easy task for anyone."
"I would suggest that the tool reconsider its pricing strategy. The recent price hikes could potentially pose a problem for VMware in the future. The recent price increases, especially since Broadcom acquired them, seem excessive. There are reports of businesses experiencing massive price hikes, sometimes as much as 10-30 times higher. This is causing smaller businesses to consider exiting the space altogether."
"I would like them to move into having a containerized application to manage the vCenter."
"Pricing is starting to get a little high-end."
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