Citrix Hypervisor Review

A virtualization platform that was easy to maintain for our staff's level of expertise and allowed for inexpensive licensing when support was required.

Allowed us to maintain the desired level of high availability between our XenServer farms. Our response time to backend errors was faster than when we had a physical server farm.

All features of the product are valuable, depends on the situation. I have used all of the features at one time or another.

Integrated workload balancing and virtual switch management that doesn't require another virtual appliance to control.

More than six years.

Rock Solid for the most part, of course, as with any technology there are software patches required for specific issues.

I haven't encountered any scalability issues yet. I have built multiple XenServer pools (simple HA pairs for SMB to large Enterprise deployments of 8-20 physical hosts).

Customer Service:

Provided you can get past the tier 1 support personnel quickly, it is great.

Technical Support:

All of the Citrix Engineers that I have worked with have been very knowledgable and helpful.

VMWare was the previous solution, we switched to lower our licensing costs and support costs.

Installation is very straightforward and can be completed in less than 5 minutes.

In-House team; I tested from the beginning and moved the platform into production.

N/A - not able to discuss

Cannot answer this question; but the product is free, you only need to purchase a license if you want commercial level support from Citrix.

At the time, there were really only a couple of companies providing virtualization platform technologies. I had found XenSource and started testing the solution.

Test, Test, Test as with any product, make sure it will accomplish what you expect. Citrix XenServer is not marketed out there so most of the people, I talk to, only are aware of VMWare and Hyper-V. XenServer fits right in the middle (in my opinion) of those two products.