If you need a low management tool, a black box as your virtual machine, Citrix Hypervisor is a very good solution. If you compare Citrix Hypervisor to Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware, both can do many more things, but you'll have to do much more work to get them up and running. Citrix is an easier solution than the others, but the problem is Citrix is not investing in that virtual surrounding. Hyper-V is now more technological than the others, so we will not install Citrix Hypervisor anymore. Our newer installations are running mostly on VMware and partially on Microsoft. We are still running some solutions on Citrix, but the next change will be to Microsoft or VMware.

We did evaluate other options before choosing this solution. 

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

I looked at VMware's vRealize Automation, but it was eliminated due to our budget constraints. 

Also tried oVirt, the FOSS project, similar to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. This had some very promising features, but was difficult to implement, and had some hardware and OS compatibility issues when running on CentOS.

We are a public (government) company. Due to legislation, most of the time, we can't simply choose a vendor. If we need to acquire a contract solution, we make a technical study where the features are evaluated and the final specifications are always based on features, not on vendors, or manufacturers.

• VMWare
• Hyper-V