Citrix XenServer Reviews

We use it for different VDI scenarios and application publishing.

I've found the following features to be the most valuable: user personalization layer, app layering, provisioning, and notification services for integration between different domains.

There are several areas that need improvement including the stability of the networking stack and networking management.

Storage monitoring also needs to be improved because at the moment, we cannot monitor GFS2 partitions on Citrix Hypervisor. This means that we need to find third party solutions.

I've been using it for 16 years.

Overall, the stability is good. However, when there are problems in some areas, such as networking, it results in problems overall with the stability of Citrix Hypervisor.

The scalability is okay for small- and medium-sized businesses. However, additional features like site recovery for multi-domains and multi-data center deployment scenarios will be useful for different customers.

As for technical support, sometimes we spend a lot of time explaining what we need to do, what we do, etc. with a lot of emails, conversations, and chats that are not very efficient. Then at other times, we have really perfect and amazing conversations with support engineers, and they quickly provide solutions and resolve our problems.

Overall, however, I've seen a decrease in the expertise of Hypervisor vendors. Previously, the time for resolution from vendor support was less than it is now.

We have used RDS, VMware, and Parellels. We switched to Citrix Hypervisor because of its scalability, management, and stability. CVAD was also a factor.

The initial setup is really easy. If you have basic knowledge of IT technology, deployment is not really difficult. However, additional components like provisioning require more knowledge and expertise, but they can be handled by mid-range admins.

Depending on the case, deployment can take from two hours to several days.

You should try Citrix Hypervisor. You may have pain points sometimes, but if you build it and tune it well for your requirements, this solution can help you do your job in different scenarios without any problems. It's all about business continuity and the stability of your solution.

Overall, I would rate Citrix Hypervisor at seven on a scale from one to ten.

Citrix Hypervisor is used for tracing any database application and AD file server, but most people are using public XenApp or XenDesktop for client virtualization.

What I find most valuable in Citrix Hypervisor is its licensing policy, because you'll get it for free if you buy a Citrix XenDesktop license. You don't need to spend additional money on the Citrix Hypervisor because you can manage both the Citrix XenDesktop and the Citrix Hypervisor with just one license, so you can save on cost.

I also like that the solution is good support-wise. Hardware support is also faster compared to other solutions.

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.

There are no issues with the stability of Citrix Hypervisor. It's good, and even the process of upgrading it is straightforward.

Citrix Hypervisor is easy to scale. Scaling it is straightforward.

Citrix Hypervisor has good support.

Installing Citrix Hypervisor is a very fast and straightforward process. Installation is faster than any other hypervisor because it is not a hyper-converged solution. People should still have some knowledge about the product to make the installation process very easy. It took less than a day to complete the installation of Citrix Hypervisor.

Citrix Hypervisor is a licensed product, and customers who buy the Citrix XenDesktop get Citrix Hypervisor for free. If they don't buy the license for Citrix XenDesktop, they'll need to pay for Citrix Hypervisor and its price is high. Pricing is even higher than VMware.

The licensing policy for Citrix Hypervisor is good. It's straightforward. The only issue is the price because it's an expensive product.

I provide Citrix Hypervisor to customers.

My company has many customers for Citrix Hypervisor, particularly more than ten customers. The product is good, but my company is slowly ruling it out. Customers are being moved to another solution because Citrix Hypervisor clusters need external storage and people nowadays are eliminating that type of technology.

I'm recommending Citrix Hypervisor to others looking into implementing it, specifically if they already have licensed client virtualization solutions such as Citrix XenApp and Citrix XenDesktop, because they could get Citrix Hypervisor for free. They could save on the cost of paying additional for hypervisors. Similarly, they could also save on cost if they get Microsoft hypervisors.

I'm rating Citrix Hypervisor nine out of ten.

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.

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.

I have been using this solution for about eight years.

It is pretty stable. We have recently upgraded to a newer version. I used 7.6 for a long time, which was very stable in spite of being end-of-support. In terms of stability, they are doing a good job.

We currently have a problem with technical support at our location. We don't have so many Citrix support companies or partners. We have just a few of them, and it is pretty difficult to get support and talk to Citrix directly. For this, two things are involved. You need to have the latest updates of infrastructure, and you should have got the support license. Otherwise, you can't get support from them. If you don't have the updated support or version, they will not give you the attention, which is a problem and a shortcoming.

I had to call them because we had a disconnect with our storage, and due to that, we lost a lot of data. I couldn't get support from Citrix because they informed me that I was using an older version of the solution. This is one of the shortcomings, so we had to work on the issue internally to resolve it. We had a backup, and we were able to restore everything,

It is easy and straightforward. It all depends on the hosting platform. You need to be sure that the host is actually compatible with the version of the hypervisor that you're using. It matters a lot. If you're not using the right or compatible infrastructure, you may run into some problems. Citrix should make this information easily available for people in a datasheet. Most of the time, you have to go online for this information. It should be easily accessible for the users so that they can easily find information about compatible platforms. 

I am fine with their license support. What we have right now is permanent, so I don't have a problem with their license.

I would recommend this solution for user endpoints or desktops. I would rate Citrix Hypervisor 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 application delivery that is centralized on-premises and hosted on data centers. For example, net applications. All the net applications I have published using the Citrix Hypervisor are there. On top of the Citrix Hypervisor, I position the Citrix application delivery infrastructure, and I have published all my applications that way. I'm just publishing and providing this application to my business users, as per their demand. It offers completely secure accessibility, and centralized access management.

The solution is extremely user friendly.

It's quite scalable.

We've found the solution to be very stable.

The product is working as per our expectations, and, it's giving us optimal performance in terms of connectivity for my end users. 

The licensing costs are too high on the solution. They should work to make the costs more reasonable.

It is not easy to adopt this quantitative footprint. It could be helpful if we could have some sort of optimum licensing model to make the adoption of this product easier. 

The integration with all products needs a bit of work. There should not be any kind of limitation for cross-areas, for example, you should be able to use Linux, and any other operating system you choose.

If I want to assign more than two TB of line, it is currently not supporting this. They should, however, because in some cases, you'd be required to have more than two TB of space. They should work to offer much more space than they do.

Our organization has been using the solution for six months so far.

However, for my part, I've been working with it for more than 14 years. 

In my environment, I am using Citrix Hypervisor for my XenApp virtual apps and desktop. We are using seven XenApps around 13 IDS app. It's very a stable product, and I have never faced any kind of problem over the last six months. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash. It's reliable.

The solution is very scalable. If an organization needs to expand, this solution will be able to handle the process. It's quite good. The scalability is one of it's greatest aspects.

We haven't had any issues with technical support. They've been very good. We're satisfied with their level of support.

The initial setup is very straightforward. There is not any complexity to worry about.

The licensing model is very expensive at the moment.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

As of now, in this COVID-19 paramedic situation, it's very remote-friendly product. It's great for IT and business processes if teams are planning to work from home remotely. This platform is quite good, in terms of publicity planning, remote connectivity, product flexibility, and user demands. Companies that want that kind of flexibility and freedom should explore this tool. It's quite useful.

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.

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.