XenServer (formerly Citrix Hypervisor) is a virtualization management platform optimized for application, desktop and server virtualization infrastructures.
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Pricing
Hyper-V
XenServer
Editions & Modules
Developer
$24.95
per month
Bronze
$49.00
per month
Silver
$89.00
per month
Gold
$135.00
per month
Platinum
$199.00
per month
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Hyper-V
XenServer
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Community Pulse
Hyper-V
XenServer
Features
Hyper-V
XenServer
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
Because Hyper-V is a Microsoft product and based on Windows OS, creating virtual Windows servers and clients are easy. When we want to test our group policies it it best to do it on hyper-v environment then implement to production clients. The same goes with operating system quality and features updates as well as operating system upgrades.
It can be really helpful & useful if we are using Citrix Hypervisor with other provisioning tools. Here are some specific scenarios where Citrix Hypervisor (formerly Citrix XenServer) is well-suited: Server Consolidation, Virtual Desktops, Disaster Recovery, Development & Testing Environments. On the other hand, there are some scenarios where Citrix Hypervisor may be less appropriate: Small-scale Deployments, Highly Heterogeneous Environments, and Limited Virtualization Requirements.
Virtualization - Hyper-V does this well and I feel like it might be the best and easiest software out there to use. I am able to spin up virtual environments very quickly. Hyper-V also has a "quick" add feature where you don't even need to have the OS ISO on your computer and you can choose between Windows 10, Server or Ubuntu.
Setup and Management - Hyper-V is pretty straight forward. When I first started using this it seemed a bit confusing, but after a couple of days of playing with it you end up finding out everything is pretty straight forward and really not that complicated.
Just turn off the VM and go into the settings and you can manage the Storage, Memory, and CPU's.
Setting a VM up on a Domain is super easy and you can create a static mac address for the machine so in Windows DHCP you can use that static mac address to give that VM an IP it can use every time it boots up.
I think the best feature is the ability to create "Checkpoints" - If you are going to be doing something over and over and you need to start from the same point with each test you can setup your VM the way you need it prior to testing. Create a Checkpoint. Do your tests and then revert back to the Checkpoint so the system will be exactly how you had it setup prior to testing. Then you can go on and do your second set of tests and so on.
Another great thing is the ability to just backup the vhdx file.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this review we run most everything from Hyper-V. I make weekly backup of the vhdx files which are the Virtual Environment files.
This is an extreme example, but if the building ever caught on fire I could go out and buy like 15 PCs at Best Buy and load up Hyper-V on them and just import the vhdx files and be back up and running fairly quickly.
I would love to see Hyper-V add a better remote control feature. As it is, it uses RDP to connect to any VM in the host. This is old technology and slowly deprecating. It would be significantly more useful to have a controlled interface for remoting to the VM's that is much more like Teamviewer, LogMeIn, etc.
Although part of this is free the free solution has limitations that make the purchase of the paid version a requirement for most medium and large enterprises.
Support for USB devices is lacking vs. its competitors.
Technical support is somewhat limited especially the free "Google browsing" type since the product is used much less vs. Hyper-V or VMWARE.
In a related issue to tech support, finding local IT support who have used the product is also challenging.
Networking/virtual networks are less stable than they should be.
Cheap and easy is the name of the game. It has great support, it doesn't require additional licenses, it works the same if it is a cluster or stand-alone, and all the servers can be centrally managed from a system center virtual machine manager server, even when located at remote sites.
With the knowledge and usage of solutions from VMware and Microsoft offering more compelling cloud integrated options it makes it more compelling in many environments which I consult. XenServer is a good product and fits the bill in many smaller environments but as clients look to the cloud or a hybrid cloud it can in some cases make it a bit more difficult.
It is very easy to configure new virtual machines and manage them. But you have to use different interfaces to perform various tasks. Especially as soon as it comes to clustering you have to use at least two different interfaces (Hyper-V Manager and Failover-Cluster Manager) to perform all necessary tasks. The newly released Windows Admin Center is a way into the right direction to get all management tasks into one single interface.
XenServer is a good product in its use and probably free if you have the right Citrix licenses already. However, it does require specific knowledge to manage, which makes it harder to manage if you don't have that knowledge in house.
In the past 2 years our Hyper-V servers have only had a handful of instances where the VM's on them were unreachable and the physical Hyper-V server had to be restarted. One time this was due to a RAM issue with the physical box and was resolved when we stopped using dynamic memory in Hyper-V. The other times were after updates were installed and the physical box was not restarted after the updates were installed.
It's been a little problematic in the past at larger VDI deployments requiring a bit more care and feeding than other vendors. But the latest releases (6.5.x) have brought about huge improvements in the stability and availability.
Hyper-V itself works quickly and rarely gave performance issues but this can be more attributed to the physical server specifications that the actual Hyper-V software in my opinion as Hyper-V technically just utilizes config files such as xml, and a data drive file (VHD, VHDX, etc) to perform its' duties.
Most of the time, you can find support on the thousands of websites, blogs and community sites that are out there. Very much Internet supported, and if you don't stray too far away from the standard setup of Hyper-v, you shouldn't go wrong. I've had to call a couple of times, and Microsoft was very good at resolving my problem. it seem that Microsoft has heard from people and their support system, and are doing a much better job in this
The staff I've worked with are very knowledgeable or able to get a very well articulated and capable support team member on the phone or helping them if necessary and they always want to ensure the best experience possible for you on the platform. The ability for the support team to reach out to hardware vendors for assistance is a nice plus too.
We had in person training from a third party and while it was very in depth it was at a beginner's level and by the time we received the training we had advanced past this level so it was monotonous and redundant at that point. It was good training though and would have provided a solid foundation for learning the rest of Hyper-V had I had it from the beginning.
Part of a training for certification to become a trainer for Citrix included an in-person training with a Master CCI. The XenServer training at this time was pretty simplified due to the product primarily being installed however you did have to work with it and mildly configure the system.
The training was easy to read and find. There were good examples in the training and it is plentiful if you use third party resources also. It is not perfect as sometimes you may have a specific question and have to spend time learning or in the rare case you get an error you might have to research that error code which could have multiple causes.
Haven't given it a real go with any online training however there are some options out there. I have taught a course following Citrix material for XenDesktop which leverages XenServer and it is pre-built so not the best for XenServer specifically for installation but configuration is mildly touched on
initial configuration of hyper-v is intuitive to anyone familiar with windows and roles for basic items like single server deployments, storage and basic networking. the majority of the problems were with implementing advanced features like high availability and more complex networking. There is a lot of documentation on how to do it but it is not seamless, even to experienced virtualization professionals.
Ensure you review the HCL (hardware compatibility list) and reach out to the hardware vendors to ensure they support the platform and in case they have documentation that can be followed for the implementation. Also ensure the prerequisites are completed prior to implementation so that as few unexpected delays occur as you can control.
Considering the maturity of ESXi, Hyper-V is something I would definitely consider using in future jobs or organisations. We selected Hyper-V after many years of using ESXi; several factors led us to this change, including a poor support experience with VMware, and the lower cost of Hyper-V. We looked at other options including Nutanix and Hyper Converged Infrastructure, however with such a busy team we didn't have the time to learn this completely new technology stack, whereas (whilst also new) Hyper-V had a much easier learning curve.
In the scheme of the real world, Citrix Hypervisor is used much less than the other two main competing products; MS Hyper-V and VMWare vSphere. So, choosing Citrix Hypervisor for your organization comes down to whether you are comfortable going with a lesser-used product. All 3 products offer hardware layered hypervisor installation which means no OS overhead headaches. That is usually positive but in some cases, with very small shops, the OS layer is needed to host other workloads so Hyper-V running on Windows is the better choice. We run both MS Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor and we chose the Citrix product for our testbed environment since any risk of running the less public supported product was lessened by not being in full production.
Nothing is perfect but Hyper-V does a great job of showing the necessary data to users to ensure that there is enough resources to perform essential functions. You can also select what fields show on the management console which is helpful for a quick glance. There are notifications that can be set up and if things go unnoticed and a Hyper-V server runs out of a resource it will safely and quickly shut down the VM's it needs to in order to ensure no Hardware failure or unnecessary data loss.
The servers latest versions have made massive improvements to scalability. But from past experience there have been issues when running workloads for extended periods of time without reboot on the hosts. I would need to run similar workloads on the 6.5 release which has changed much of the bottlenecks or issues so I'd imagine its far more capable now, Perhaps able to stand near the best in the market.
Xenserver is easy to learn. We paid for support only for installation and deployment in the first three years, and now our team has the knowledge to solve most problems.
Low CAPEX if you have a team that uses open source software day by day.
But paid support is necessary to solve critical problems. The open source community is not enough. Actually, we have difficulty solving some bugs without paying for support.
Medium OPEX if you have a team that uses open source software day by day.
