Citrix XenServer Reviews

I use Citrix Hypervisor for virtualization.

The most valuable feature of this product is that its scripting can automate procedures. I have also had a very good experience with its storage.

I have been using this solution for almost ten years.

I had no problems with the initial setup.

The cost of this product is not high.

Citrix is an excellent tool, we don't have any issues or complaints about it. I would rate this solution as ten out of ten.

Some months ago, I used this solution to create some virtual machines. I could replicate some of these virtual machines, and clusterization, and some reports.

The online support material is great. Citrix has the more complete online material.

The product is more inclusive than other options, which is nice. 

It's not as complex as other options. It's easier to use.

The onboarding process is pretty straightforward. 

The product is a great option for enterprise-level organizations.

The solution offers a wide array of compatibility with, for example, some image files of other systems, and can be virtualized using another solution. The Citrix Hypervisor has a larger range of compatibility.

The solution is only in English. It would be ideal if it was in Portuguese. 

I've used the solution for a number of years. 

If you are an enterprise-level organization, this solution will fit your needs. It works well for large companies. 

I also work with Hyper-V.

The initial setup isn't too difficult. It's fairly simple and straightforward. A company shouldn't have any issues with it. 

We can implement this solution for our clients if they need us to.

I was not involved in the acquisition of the solution, so I do not have exact details about the pricing.

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.

We are service providers.We are implementers and sometimes we do the plans of the implementation.

In this company, we mostly have on-premise solutions, such as hypervisors. For example, the Microsoft Hypervisors, Citrix Hypervisors, et cetera. Here in the company, we don't use exactly cloud solutions, or not entirely cloud. We use many hybrid solutions. We have a Citrix Orchestrator inside our infrastructure.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for this product is that it serves as the main computing platform for our enterprise software. Our ERP system and our SQL Servers run on top of that and all the applications that we deploy are essentially virtualized.

Server consolidation has saved us a lot of money over the years. Being a non-profit that is a very big consideration for us.

The feature that is most valuable to us is the XenMotion (live migration) feature. It is critical for us, especially when doing maintenance work. That is a must-have feature. Also Storage XenMotion. The ability to move a VM while it is still running and continue doing maintenance on that is a big advantage.

The third-party integration is not very advanced. I don't know if it's a lack of interest by developers. Compared with VMware, Xenserver doesn't have a lot of third-party add-ons. Maybe in some way that can be improved.

The number one feature that would make it a more robust product is a backup solution. Right now we have to buy Xen Orchestra as a separate solution to manage the tasks a little bit better. If it was integrated within the product, that would be good. Maybe Citrix should just buy Xen Orchestra and improve on it. It is a very good product. It does everything we want to do, but it's a separate product which means we have to pay another license in addition to the ones for XenServer. So I really would want to see improvements in the backup arena and a more robust clean-up job after some tasks such as snapshots fail to complete.

I have been using the product since 2011, so I have been using it eight years or more.

As far as stability, we have never had any problems that we've not been able to overcome. The only thing we have experienced is that sometimes when you are doing your backups or you are creating a snapshot, you get orphaned images or other unnecessary files that the system fails to auto clean. But this is not really any failure of the system as far as stability. 

We have 16 licenses at the moment and we run it on four Dell R910 machines with four CPUs in each, and each is eight-core. 

It is easy to scale up. You can grow as you wish.

The technical support is quite quick and responsive. Whenever we have a problem, they are able to log in and check on the issue for us. Technical support has been good for us. We do pay for annual tech support. They are quite good.

Initially, I would say the setup was straightforward. When we consulted with Citrix about our plan for implementation we created our design diagrams, then we sent them the diagrams so they could check whether the design was going to work or not. When they looked at our diagram, they confirmed that it was a good design in terms of fail-over at both hardware level (host pools and storage) as well as physical network design. So we just deployed the product the way we had planned and it was straight forward after the plan was confirmed.

I would advise that with this setup, you are better off also taking up the paid support. The Tech support with these guys is fantastic. They will call you within minutes of logging the issue and with you to resolve the problem. If you provide access to the host they will log in and troubleshoot with you and show you which commands were run to solve the problem. 10/10 score on Technical support.

I think the biggest issue that I've seen that scares off a lot of potential customers is that they think it is complicated to set up. There are not many people who have deployed the product compared to other products. I think new clients should start small and gain confidence. There is no harm in having a mixed environment where they can at least try it out. If they like it they can continue to roll out the deployment. 

For us, the attraction has been that the licensing is straight forward. You don't have to think about what it will cost for add on features. It's really straightforward in that you pay for the number of CPU cores you have and that is if you want Technical Support. It is very easy for us to predict our costs. With other products, it is really difficult to know how much it's going to cost from year-to-year. With this product, we are able to say for sure what the cost will be.

On a scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate this product as a nine. It is not a ten only because I don't have an easy way to do replication and backup. We had to learn to use the command line just to do that. But other than that, it's a very stable product. We have never had trouble, in addition, the hypervisor has a very small footprint on the host.

We primarily use the solution for infrastructure. It is like a DNS active directory.

The compatibility of the solution is its most valuable feature. It's compatible on almost every cloud these days.

The performance, storage capabilities and network are all aspects of the solution that needs improvement.

The solution should be more flexible and allow for greater customization.

I've been using the solution for six or seven years.

The solution is pretty stable.

We have about 50-100 users right now and it works well for us.

Generally, I do not use the solution's technical support, but I haven't heard very good things from those that have.

The initial setup was straightforward. It wasn't complex. It was very easy.

We're using the on-premises deployment model.

I'd generally recommend that if someone is considering using this solution that they look into other options first. 

I'd rate the solution six out of ten.

We primarily use the solution to deploy some services for our final users. 

The solution's security is its most valuable aspect.

The customization is very good.

Technical support is very, very good. They are very knowledgeable and responsive.

The pricing is good if you compare it to what else is on the market.

Overall, I can't think of a feature that is lacking. We've been pretty satisfied overall.

We've been using the solution for a while. We've used it over the last 12 months at least.

The stability is very good. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. We find it good. It's reliable.

The scalability is good. If a company needs to expand it, it should be able to rather effectively. It's so easy to create new users and add new features that can be integrated into the solution.

We do plan to increase usage. There may be about 50 people now, however, but by the end of the year, we may be up to 100 or so.

The solution offers very good technical support. We've been very satisfied with the level of service that they provide.

We didn't previously use a different solution. This is our first product for our company to use in this manner.

The initial setup is not complex. It's pretty straightforward. It was easy.

Depending on the configuration and the number of users the deployment times differ. Typically, it will take between one and three hours.

We used three to five people for deployment and maintenance.

We used a Citrix integrator that assisted us in the implementation.

I'd say that the ROI has been good, however, it is not so easy to calculate that. When you get satisfaction from the users and the way they can work around the solution, that's the best return of investment that you can get from any kind of solution.

We pay for licensing yearly. It's a subscription-based license. We find the price to be quite good.

We are a reseller.

This may be the best solution on the market for these purposes. We've been very happy with it so far.

I'd rate the solution for nine out of ten.

This product makes up our infrastructure and we use it to host several servers.

The continued uptime of our virtual machines is good. If there's a problem with one host, the machines get migrated off. This is something that works well.

Live migration is something that can be improved.

Modification of virtual machines, while they're still powered on, should be supported.

I have been working with Citrix Hypervisor for about a year and a quarter.

The newest revision appears to be pretty stable.

This is a scalable solution.

I have worked with other hypervisors in the past and Citrix is a little more basic.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

Citrix is a good low-cost alternative to VMware, so if budgeting is an issue then I would recommend it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is for providing virtual machines to the customers.

It reduced the number of physical workstations. There was a requirement to have several different workstations physically.

Also, it helped us to keep it standard. This allowed more management of the virtual machines.

The most valuable features are being able to host many virtual machines and being able to patch machines. For example, have a primary and secondary machine and being able to put the user on one machine and patch up the other one and rotate.

Some of the tools are different from VMware and there are some issues with speed in the network.

They need to have some cleared individuals on their team.

There are some limits, and technical support could be improved. The online documentation could be better found within the accounts. 

There is an issue with having an actual account versus a standard account. 

You need a licensed account to look up technical support.

Better return time when reaching out for support would be an improvement.

I had been working with Citrix Hypervisor for approximately six years.

They incremented every new version that came out from XenServer 6 to 7.5.

There were several times where there were some glitches or it crashed. 

Our network is a standalone one that is not connected to the outside. Being able to either update or get any type of support without allowing outside into the internal network was sometimes difficult.

It's a scalable solution. It's easy to scale.

We looked at scaling and going into machine creation services where you have one machine and that's the gold master machine in the update.

We have approximately 150 users in our organization. 

Their roles were mostly purposes, usual work.

I have used technical support. They were helpful but not helpful for the environment that I worked with because of security reasons. We couldn't give access to the internal network.

Previously, we did not use another solution. We started with Citrix Hypervisor.

I was not a part of the setup process.

I would definitely suggest that you do a trade study with other Hypervisors available.

I would rate Citrix Hypervisor a six out of ten.

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 15 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.