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.
"This is a good product for virtualization and it is easy to use."
"Citrix Hypervisor does a great job overall, such as the virtualization of the host. It's very easy to manage the virtual machine, to create, and configure high availability."
"The price is the solution's most valuable feature."
"This solution allows the end users to clone, start, stop, or remotely control their VMs."
"It is quite flexible and rugged. It is also easy to understand and user-friendly. It is not as complicated as some of the other solutions. It has its technicalities, but it is easy to understand. You can easily pick up in a short period of time and understand how to manage the infrastructure."
"The feature I find most valuable, is its performance"
"The solution is extremely user friendly."
"We can easily migrate VMs from one host to another."
"Scalability is the big advantage of it. The product itself allows us to scale on the fly as we need it, and plan for the future."
"The product offers good stability."
"The product is very easy to install."
"We have seen a performance boost because we have been able to more dynamically allocate either memory or processors."
"The tool provides 99.99% uptime."
"The most valuable features are its flexibility and the ability to move workload."
"The solution is user-friendly and easy to manage."
"Ease of support is one of the main features that we have with it. We're able to take Snapshots before doing updates to make it easy to roll back if something does happen to go wrong."
"Citrix is not investing in the virtual surroundings."
"I think the technical support could be better."
"It needs improvement with the security features."
"Network management needs improvement because it is not very stable."
"It needs to have a more robust backup solution."
"I would like the possibility of updating the hypervisor by applying security patches."
"The interface has to be updated."
"Citrix Hypervisor is expensive if you get it as a stand-alone product, so this is one area for improvement. Its price could be cheaper. We also found other areas for improvement in Citrix Hypervisor, for example, we can't use SCIM provisioning, and there are limitations to the size of the HDD. Another area for improvement is the pass-through storage, in particular the removable storage, because that also has limitations where you can't connect to the drive if it is more than one TB."
"It's inherently complex. Operating a large virtual infrastructure is not an easy task for anyone."
"From my point of view, my advice is to design the solution properly the first time."
"They can maybe review its price. They can also consider offering a free public version for development for a certain number of users."
"The technical support is poor. We are in Australia, but we do not have the same level of support as the US and Europe."
"Pricing is starting to get a little high-end."
"It would be highly beneficial for VMware to collaborate with local hosts and partners in countries like those in Africa to establish specific pricing that would align with the economic conditions of countries in Africa, ensuring suitability and compatibility with our consumption capabilities."
"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."
"The HTML 5 client has always lagged behind."
Citrix Hypervisor is ranked 8th in Server Virtualization Software with 46 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 446 reviews. Citrix Hypervisor is rated 8.2, while VMware vSphere is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Citrix Hypervisor writes "Allows us to allocate CPU, memory, storage, and network resources across VMs and minimizes downtime in case of hardware failure or maintenance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSphere writes "Offers good performance and is useful for banking systems". Citrix Hypervisor is most compared with Proxmox VE, Hyper-V, KVM, Oracle VM VirtualBox and Nutanix AHV Virtualization, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and Oracle VM VirtualBox. 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 www.citrix.com 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