We performed a comparison between Citrix Hypervisor, KVM, and Oracle VM VirtualBox based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Proxmox, VMware, Microsoft and others in Server Virtualization Software."Citrix Hypervisor integrates easily and I can manage the infrastructure better. If I need to take a machine down to expand the hard drive, I do not have to physically be here. I do not need to order new equipment or new hard drives. I can shut it down, increase the drive space and bring it back up."
"Scripting can automate procedures."
"The solution is extremely stable."
"The solution is easy to deploy. It's very easy to understand problems and read logs."
"We find there are good central maintenance and central management panels."
"Citrix Hypervisor is quick to deploy and easy to manage."
"The solution integrates well with other solutions, which makes it really strong as a primary solution to deploy."
"We can easily migrate VMs from one host to another."
"I like that this is an open-source solution. It is very powerful, and it's easy."
"It is an open ecosystem, and we see there is a benefit in open-source solutions."
"There is a strong emphasis on availability, and they have numerous API interfaces for distributed storage and the solution is quite known for its openness."
"A very reliable solution which can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with reasonable overhead."
"I like that it's easy to manage. It's also more powerful when it comes to security than others. That point of view is the one consideration. The other consideration is that it's cost-effective."
"Good screen and keyboard sharing feature."
"One of the best features of KVM is its user-friendly interface."
"The tool's most valuable feature is backup. The product makes it easy to manage virtual machines. Other tools require third-party applications like VMware and vSphere. However, KVM doesn't require these applications."
"It's a pretty good product in terms of monitoring."
"The good thing is that it is multi-platform. Once you create a virtual machine in one particular environment, you can switch over to see if you can run it in other environments. For example, if you are on Windows and you create this virtual machine, you can actually go ahead and change the operating system. You can switch it over to Linux or Mac OS and see if you can run the VirtualBox on those particular machines. It even runs on some of the commercial operating systems that are not mainstream, such as Solaris and BSD. These kinds of operating systems are also supported by VirtualBox. The other thing that is good about VirtualBox is that it is open source. So, if you need to do any modifications for your own purposes, you can just download the source, modify it, and deploy it in your environment. It is pretty good and very versatile. You can create and manipulate virtual machines from the command line, which is also very important. It's something that some other products on the desktop side do not have. VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop don't have a good command-line interface to create and manipulate virtual machines, whereas VirtualBox has it out of the box, which is pretty good."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The snapshot feature is very powerful; it protects us from disaster."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the ability to manage multiple operating systems through one application."
"This product is very user-friendly and easy to use."
"The product gives us the flexibility to try different machines."
"The flexibility as well as performance wise and as well as data volume, we have huge volume stored."
"It needs to have a more robust backup solution."
"The graphics user interface is pretty bad."
"Overall, I can't think of a feature that is lacking. We've been pretty satisfied overall."
"I would like the possibility of updating the hypervisor by applying security patches."
"We'd like them to add more automation to the product."
"Citrix is not investing in the virtual surroundings."
"The solution would benefit from faster technical support."
"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."
"The initial setup of this solution is more difficult than some of the competing products and it could be improved."
"In our setup, we do not have any dashboards or orchestration, and it is hard to manage. We have 25 gig network cards, but the software driver we have only supported 10 gigs."
"Technical support is not top-notch."
"I have encountered difficulties in getting the tool's documentation."
"The grid interface of KVM needs improvement. It could be more beautiful, especially when compared to VMware."
"Lacks high availability across clusters as well as support for Apache CloudStack."
"We are not getting good support from KVM, and it is not that user-friendly."
"Its resource usage can be improved."
"It has some issues when you have some weird device drivers. For instance, when you have a weird sound driver working on your machine, and the VirtualBox needs to output the sound of the virtual machine into the sound driver of the physical machine, the bare metal, it doesn't work too well. If you tweak lots of drivers and play around with the different kinds of drivers and machines, you will probably break something. I have not played with it too much and maybe it already supports it, but it would probably be good to have the ability to use a container from the virtual machine environment instead of spinning off a complete virtual machine. There are other tools for that. On Linux, you have a DXE, LXC framework, and you have Docker as well. Docker is good because it is multi-platform, and you can run Docker on pretty much anything, even different processors, but it would be good if we had a VirtualBox running on it while spinning off containers instead of full virtual machines. The other thing that will become important, and I'm pretty sure that they are thinking about it as well is that there's this new hardware platform that Apple is releasing, which is an ARM-based new chip. So, VirtualBox will probably have to work on ARM-based CPUs as well."
"The solution lacks some open source remote administration tools. The reload of individual virtual machine definitions through the vboxweb service (via its API) without restarting it and the access to shared storage (to use teleport functions) need to be improved."
"The solution has to do a better job of promoting the product and its licensing capabilities."
"I find the solution to be incredibly unstable, constantly falling over and not working properly."
"Oracle needs to improve its hot virtual machine migration. It didn't work as intended. It should allow us to migrate between virtual machines, without stopping the database."
"We're working with them to be able to allow the local USB ports to be ported over to the remote desktop, running VirtualBox."
"Basically, the GUI and command-line interface need improvement."
"The installation is difficult and could be improved."
