Citrix XenServer Reviews

Our primary use case of this solution is virtualization. 

The feature I find most valuable is its performance. It's a no "frills" solution. There aren't many tools and some may find that a little arcane, but I come from another visualization background. I like the console because you can do everything on the console, so you don't need any tools. 

This solution needs a block-level backup. We have backup solutions in place but they are pretty arcane. That is a niche, it is not filled with professional solutions. There are solutions that can do it - if you look at solutions for file system level backups, you will find many of them. But if you look for systems with block-level backup or block-level synchronization, you will see that the tools are pretty minor.

The solution is extremely stable. It's much more stable than VMware or any other tool that we've tested. One might get away with freeware solutions, but if you need support, I recommend using the commercial solution. 

It is easy to scale with this solution. I can scale up and scale down when I need to. And for memory and the VCPU's, it's even simpler because you can simply select that interface, and it will follow. Since I started using the 7.6 version, I can move virtual hosts around, so that's all working extremely well without any hurdles or hiccups. Our company has 600 employees and about 60% of them are using XenServer.

I think the technical support could be better because we have received support directly from the Dell server instead of from Citrix directly. It is difficult to get hold of support during office hours and sometimes will take a while to get the right person for the right answer. But apart from that, the quality of the answers and the support is very good.

The initial setup was very easy. It starts very easy and if you have special niche cases that are not provided, they are standard to install. You would, however, need to get yourself comfortable with the console, but if you have a Linux background, you will find that it is very easy. I did 90% of the installation myself, but we used third parties for special niche cases. We also needed support from Dell because we had some issues during startup with some drivers that were provided by Dell since we are mainly using Dell hardware.

My advice to others would be that there is no one golden bullet when choosing a virtualization platform. It depends on the careful planning of what kind of service you plan to provide to your users. Ask questions like: What is running on those systems? What platforms? What are your minimum demands? 

There's something else that's fairly important because the virtualization market is rapidly shifting towards a total overhaul. And efforts are being made on the Linux site to run armed and risk solutions in the data center. So I hope that XenServer will adapt to that too.

This solution has special niche cases where it doesn't work as you planned. But in general, I am very happy with the server. I will give it a rating of nine out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for Citrix worker resources.

The price is the solution's most valuable feature.

The manageability of the solution needs improvement. It's an extremely bad product to handle. 

The solution needs to offer better implementation of shared storage.

The solution is not stable.

The solution is scalable. 

I don't like the cluster functionality, but it's scalable. You can put a new service inside, and it works. The only thing is the shared storage, which does not have a good implementation. With LVM, it's a bad idea to use real partitioning. It's advisable instead to use a container file like Hyper-V or VMware.

Technical support is too slow. It takes too long. Especially in comparison with VMware. Their the support is much better.

In most cases the set up is straightforward. In special cases, especially for shared storage, it's not a great implementation experience.

We're using the on-premises deployment model.

I would advise others to only to use it with functionality where the high availability is available through other mechanisms, like Citrix, and not to use the features from the product itself.

I'd rate the solution four out of ten.

My primary use of the product is for the purpose of server virtualization. It is used for virtualizing our web servers.

It provides a free, easy means of virtualization which would otherwise be costly to implement.

I'm currently using the free version, so I'm limited as to what I find the most valuable in the broader set of product features. For me, just the ability to virtualize servers is the most valuable.

To improve the product, I would like to be able to use the high availability of XenServer but the free version does not have that feature. I would really like to have a different trial option so I could try out the broader set of available options even if it is for a limited time.

It's pretty complicated to set up the server order and that can be simplified in the product. If a server shuts down the order in which the virtual servers will come up should be something that I can designate easily. The order can make a difference in a successful startup.

As far as stability, I haven't had a problem. I highly recommend the product and I think it deserves good feedback as to stability.

The scalability is good. I really like the cloning option as it makes scaling easy. I don't have a problem with enhancing my setup. I'm very satisfied with it. 

I never request any technical support for the product directly from the company so I can not speak to the product support directly. I found the community and the forum very helpful when I had questions. The people there are very helpful. It is easy to find a solution if I have any problems.

The setup for the product is pretty straightforward. I use it straight out of the box in the limited free version on two servers that allows me to configure virtualization. It's a pretty easy solution to install and use.

I installed the product myself. I did not require assistance.

It is nice to be able to have a product that is free to use. Although it is simple, it does what I need it to do. The version you pay for has more features. I know that I would like to use some of the features in the paid version, but I can not justify the cost at this time.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate XenServer as an eight. There are some problems, but it is also not the full release version.

I use XenServer to migrate all the old servers of my clients. I think it is a robust, proven and free option.

I find it very easy to manage and at a cost that small customers would never refuse (free).

The most valuable feature is the possibility of creating virtual machine templates from a snapshot and vice versa. It saves me many hours of work.

I would like the possibility of updating the hypervisor by applying security patches. In the free version, it is a bit annoying.

Our primary use case for this solution is for cloud automation.

This solution allows the end users to clone, start, stop, or remotely control their VMs.

The most valuable feature is the cost; it is a free product.

The self-service user portal needs to be more granular and be more customizable.

The stability of this solution is great, so far.

In terms of scalability, so far so good.

There are approximately two hundred users, with their roles being QA and development. I do expect that the usage will increase a little bit.

There is a paid option for this solution that comes with support, but with the free version that I am using, it is not supported. That is probably a weakness in most corporate environments, but we use it for QA and stuff of that nature.

Previously we were using vCenter from VMware. Our company was purchased and split in half, and I didn't know if we would be continuing the enterprise licensing with VMware so I had to find a free solution. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

It took about four weeks to deploy. We have a small environment.

I handled the deployment personally, and I am the person who maintains the solution for now.

Had I been using the paid version, at $6,000 for an annual license, I believe that it would have paid for itself already.

We use the free version, so there is no charge. To subscribe to the paid version with support, it is approximately $6,000 per year. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

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

I really like this solution, but it is not widely known. I'm really surprised that more people don't know about it. I find that it suits our needs pretty well.

Considering what I am getting for the cost I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. There are more powerful solutions out there, but they're very costly.

If I were paying for the support then I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this primarily for core banking, automative industry, data applications, and more.

We find there are good central maintenance and management panels.

It needs improvement with the securit 

I think it provides good performance.

The scalability of the solution is good. We have less than 100 people currently using the solution. 

We have in-house IT tech support that helps us with solving tech issues.

The initial setup is very easy and we can do it quickly.

I advise customers to consider pricing and licensing. 

The pricing and licensing is so important. Customers do consider the price seriously. 

High-availability options in a cluster are good.

We were able to create a very inexpensive (nearly free) cluster of VM hosts.

Permissions granularity was very limited - we could not assign permissions on anything smaller than the entire cluster. Support for OS'es without paravirtualization-friendly device drivers was very limited - couldn't run some versions of Linux.

6 months

Clustered-host hardware needed to be identical, all-or-nothing permissions didn't work well for VM's owned by different teams.

Lots of errors, which may or may not have been important.  It was tough to assess the health of the cluster.

n/a - we used the free, open-source distribution of XenServer.

Used VMWare, before and after. VMWare was more expensive.

Initial software setup of XenServer is very simple, but the hardware setup is more complex. Switching and shared-storage infrastructure needed to be mapped out in advance (which is true for any VM-host-cluster environment).

in-house

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.

Citrix or third-party software would probably make it more flexible and powerful than the plain, FOSS XenServer components.

Xen is an open source virtualization server widely used in IT. It provides simple and robust commands to manage Xen environment for managing virtual hosts.Backup and recovery of virtual hosts are simple. It can be managed remotely with XenCenter. It supports all client OS like windows, linux etc !!

It requires system with large number of CPUs and large number of memory to support guest operating systems. Not able to export virtual hosts in other virtualization softwares.

I have been using Xen for 4 servers now and still using it. 

Highly recommended and suited for administrators having sound knowledge of open source commands. !!