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.
"We find there are good central maintenance and central management panels."
"The solution is extremely stable."
"The compatibility of the solution is its most valuable feature. It's compatible on almost every cloud these days."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is very fast. It also works very well for physically small servers."
"The continued uptime of our virtual machines is good."
"Ability to move your virtual machines from one host to another."
"The support for this solution is phenomenal."
"The solution is easy to deploy. It's very easy to understand problems and read logs."
"The scalability is good."
"Once you have everything configured, it is relatively straightforward."
"The latest innovation always comes from VMware."
"The scalability of the solution is good. You can scale up to maximum levels."
"Most valuable features of vSphere 6.7, for us, at the management level would be: VCHA is a nice redundancy feature that they added in v6.7. I like the quality of life improvements with the VMFS-6 for using auto UNMAP on the data stores. And we really appreciate the improvements to the Clarity UI where we can manage Update Manager (VUM) and our vSAN stack within the modern interface."
"Security-Features; vSphere does offer quite a bit of security stuff built-in. It is nice to know that we can have the virtual machines encrypted, so that if somebody were to get a hold of any of those files, we don't have to worry about them actually being used. Since we do have so many different departments and areas with a lot of people that need access into the solution, we can use the role-based access controls to really restrict and control who can do what, so everybody can do what they need to do, but they can't do anything else past that."
"We use the solution's vMotion feature to migrate VMs from one host to another across different environments and data centers."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is the ease of deployment. It's also user-friendly and has been on the market for more than a decade, so it's a leading technology in hypervisor solutions."
"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 built-in networking features are a little limited."
"There are several areas that need improvement including the stability of the networking stack and networking management."
"Live migration is something that can be improved."
"It needs to have a more robust backup solution."
"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."
"Assigning the order of virtual server startup is not very easy and this can be improved."
"I am not very sure about how flexible Citrix Hypervisor is with different types of infrastructures. I only know it is flexible with Nutanix, but I am not sure if it is also flexible with others. They can make its integration with other platforms or OEMs easy. They should also make it easy for users to manage their infrastructure. Citrix should make compatibility information related to a hypervisor easily available in a datasheet. Citrix isn't really recognized in this part of the world, and they need to expand their solution and make it more available. There are a lot of customers and companies that are looking for a solution like Citrix, and it should be available in this part of the world. They need to educate people more. Technically, it is good and flexible and has good ability, but it is not as much known as VMware or Microsoft. Their support should also be improved. Currently, if you don't have an updated version, they will not give you the attention."
"Its cost needs to be improved. It is very expensive as compared to other solutions."
"It is expensive. They can improve the licensing cost for Cloud Director. They can also improve the integration with other applications and the metering feature, which is currently not flexible."
"The UI of VMware could use some improvements, especially in dark mode."
"It's inherently complex. Operating a large virtual infrastructure is not an easy task for anyone."
"Customer support takes a long time to respond."
"Reporting on vCenter needs to be improved."
"Response time could be improved."
"Here in Egypt, we would like everything free. So if you give us the license for free, we would be thrilled."
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