XenServer Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services Reviews & Insights

Score7 out of 10

74 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for XenServer are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

Organizations have found XenServer to be a valuable alternative to VMWare ESXi, allowing them to consolidate their physical servers and manage their environment efficiently with XoA. Users have reported improved speed and delivery of IT services by utilizing individual servers for each department. Additionally, XenServer is widely used as a host for VDI infrastructure, enabling the creation and management of virtual desktop environments.

XenServer addresses various business problems, including server consolidation, flexibility and scalability, disaster recovery, and cost reduction. The scope of use cases for XenServer can range from small-scale deployments for individual departments or teams to large-scale enterprise deployments spanning multiple data centers. For example, the University of Sao Paulo and other public institutes in Brazil rely on XenServer as the principal hypervisor for their private cloud, offering infrastructure as a service to the academic community.

Citrix Hypervisor, another name for XenServer, is often used as the sole hypervisor in entire Citrix environments, reducing hardware expenses and providing virtualization for production servers. It allows organizations to leverage their hardware resources efficiently by running multiple virtual machines on each physical server, resulting in cost savings related to licensing, hardware, and power needs. Users appreciate the ease of use and straightforwardness when creating new VMs with XenServer.

In addition to these use cases, Citrix Hypervisor offers scalability and a combination of remote desktop services and web interface servers. However, it is important to note that implementing and managing this product require long-term vision, planning, and a competent team. Nonetheless, XenServer has proven beneficial for teaching virtualization classes and setting up workloads for clients encompassing IT labs, VDI environments, and server workloads.

XenServer Reviews

4 Reviews

Professional, Scientific, and Technical ServicesInformation Technology & Services4

A cost effective host for your Citrix environment!

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

January 6, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use XenServer as the hostserver for our Citrix VM's. We use XenServer instead of VMware for these machines because XenServer allows us to use GPU's without extra licensing costs. Other than that it also makes sure all of the Citrix resource load is on our Xen farm instead of VMware farm.

Pros

Free use of GPU's
Integrates well with the other Citrix products

Cons

Logging of tasks and events
Performance overview history

Likelihood to Recommend

I would definitely recommend using XenServer if we want or need to use GPU's for your Citrix farm but don't want to buy a Enterprise Plus license for your VMware environment. It also integrates very well with the rest of the Citrix products if you are using those. It also has less CVE's than vmware.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (Information Technology and Services company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Citrix Hypervisor: Empowering Efficient Virtualization and Disaster Recovery.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

June 26, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using VDI infrastructure which is hosted on Citrix XenServer. All of our Virtual Desktop environments are being created and managed on Citrix hypervisors. The business problems it addresses: Server Consolidation, Flexibility & Scalability, Disaster Recovery, Cost Reduction, etc. The scope of the use case may vary depending on the organization's specific requirements. It can range from small-scale deployments for individual departments or teams to large-scale enterprise deployments spanning multiple data centers.

Pros

Host Virtual Desktops.
Application Virtualization is much easier.
Scalability & Flexibility.

Cons

Resource pools are not reliable.
No provision for automated desktop creation.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Arvind Kumar

System Specialist in Information Technology at Admiral India (Information Technology & Services, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

View profile

A Decent Choice

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

July 1, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Citrix Hypervisor as one of our virtualization tools. The ability to run multiple VMs on each physical server has been beneficial. As one of the leading virtualization management platforms, it offers many great features out of the box. The ability to quickly set up and configure and easily managed environment are among a few of the positives. It's not the most robust and feature packed, but it's cheap and relatively simple to use.

Pros

Creating VMS - virtualizing physical or already virtual images is a snap
Configuration - in a smaller environment, configuration is simple and easy to understand
Templates and Clones - the ability to create these on the fly make it great for a dev environment

Cons

Support - if free is what you need, great support is not what you'll get, keep in mind if support is necessary
Upgrades - the upgrade process is buggy and problematic at best
Partner Support - if you're looking for a product with multiple parters rolled in, I'd look elsewhere

Likelihood to Recommend

Citrix Hypervisor is well suited for quickly standing up a virtualized environment. As the environment scales, there is less efficiency within the platform, however. The partnership with Microsoft seems strong, but that also limits the product in the end. If other partnerships were as in depth as Citrix with MS products, it would greatly enhance the overall score. I would not recommend this product if you need to virtualize a large, complex system.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (Information Technology and Services company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

XenServer reviewed by an avid Citrix and VDI engineer

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 7, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The XenServer workloads I have set up and currently provide are primarily for clients. These workloads cover anything from an IT lab, VDI and Server workloads for the entire data center. It is a mixed use hypervisor in most environments where it is placed for a purpose (such as VDI) at a cost savings and management supplement due to its ease of use.

Pros

Manages upgrades to the pool of hypervisor hosts with relative ease through a console (if licensed).
Makes it easy to create machine templates and clones and move them around within the pool of hosts.
Handles failures reasonably well through the use of the pool database copied on each host

Cons

Adding or presenting additional storage to the host can often be a task that is far more involved than competitive products.
The product can require reboots more frequently than competitors due to the DOM kernel getting "hung up".
Sometimes when a virtual machine is deleted it still leaves behind orphaned vdisks.
Recovering from the loss of a host can sometimes cause virtual machines to require lengthy command prompt scripting to fix so they can be powered back on from another host.

Likelihood to Recommend

I feel XenServer is well suited for VDI based workloads at least within the Citrix product portfolio as it is extremely easy to set up and manage. It is also a reasonably well suited platform for smaller data centers which require less complexity and monitoring. Workloads requiring the usage of shared GPU are well suited for XenServer.

The product is less well suited for large enterprise data centers. However, new versions are bringing features to allow the hypervisor to contend. Complex virtual networking environments may not be well suited for XenServer.

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology (Information Technology and Services company, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

5 years of experience