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."
"This solution allows the end users to clone, start, stop, or remotely control their VMs."
"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."
"This is a dependable solution for virtualization with a good community for product support."
"What I find most valuable in Citrix Hypervisor is its licensing policy, because you'll get it for free if you buy a Citrix XenDesktop license. You don't need to spend additional money on the Citrix Hypervisor because you can manage both the Citrix XenDesktop and the Citrix Hypervisor with just one license, so you can save on cost. I also like that the solution is good support-wise. Hardware support is also faster compared to other solutions."
"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."
"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."
"We find the solution simple and efficient to manage."
"It's easy to use, and it is flexible."
"It affords us different views of the VMs created by vSphere so we can control them better."
"I use customization to prevent any network and DNS collisions to the router."
"It's much more stable than other products. It is scalable and easy to implement as well."
"The solution is easy to use, user-friendly interface and has high availability features. When comparing it to other solutions it is more robust."
"With the current compliance options that I have to go through, it's very nice to have a lot of the encryption built in. It checks a lot of boxes for the federal level so I don't have to either bolt something on or have something on top of it. Having it native and integrated into the system makes things much easier."
"One of the most valuable features that vSphere has is its HA and DRS protection, where it can simply make sure that all the machines are always where they need to be and how they need to be taken care of. We have a lot of servers and services for emergency services for police, fire, and the like. We have the ability to use DRS as Anti-Affinity Rules to make sure that those redundant server pairs always stay away from each other. But then, if anything would happen to one of them, we have HA to be able to come up and bring it right up and going again."
"The product could be faster and licensing options could be improved."
"It needs improvement with the security features."
"Integration with other vendors and other applications could be improved."
"Overall, I can't think of a feature that is lacking. We've been pretty satisfied overall."
"The graphics user interface is pretty bad."
"You need a licensed account to look up technical support."
"The manageability of the solution needs improvement. It's an extremely bad product to handle."
"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."
"On the older version of VMware vSphere, possibly version four, we had a feature that allowed us to backup Ziploc machines. It has not been available in the newer version such as six or seven. I have been looking for another solution to accomplish the backups but they should bring back this plugin-type tool to allow older backup capabilities."
"Stability and manageability need improvement."
"I would like to see improvements in simplifying automation, cloud native deployment, administration, and fault resolution."
"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."
"The license fee could be more affordable."
"There are occasionally bugs or errors."
"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."
"The price could be better."
Citrix Hypervisor is ranked 8th in Server Virtualization Software with 45 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 443 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 "Allows for easy management of snapshots for virtual machines and good web console ". Citrix Hypervisor is most compared with Proxmox VE, Hyper-V, Oracle VM VirtualBox, KVM 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 http://www.citrix.com/products.html?posit=glnav 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