VMWare vs Citrix how do they work together

egrizzly

Hello all,

For you virtualization guys I thought to share something here I heard which boggled me. Our VP for virtualization said that VMWare and Citrix complement each other! I almost could not believe my ears. I always thought that they were competing products. At the place where I work they primarily use Citrix to provide a desktop resource for remote users. I've rarely seen any VMware implementations at the user level. It is the reverse situation in the job I had before that.. However this guy is the VP, so I'm betting he knows what he's talking about.

So how do Citrix and VMWare complement each other?.....(or how do they not)?

DPG

Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop virtual machines running on VMware vSphere.

egrizzly

DPG wrote: »

Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop virtual machines running on VMware vSphere.

So the correct statement would have been that "VMware is needed in order to run Citrix"

scott28tt

You could have all-Citrix with XenApp and XenDesktoo on XenServer, you could have all-VMware with Horizon View and AppVolumes on vSphere, or you could mix and match in various ways.

egrizzly

scott28tt wrote: »

You could have all-Citrix with XenApp and XenDesktoo on XenServer, you could have all-VMware with Horizon View and AppVolumes on vSphere, or you could mix and match in various ways.

...so it is a fact then that you can have a purely Citrix environment without a trace of VMware, as well as a purely VMware environment without a trace of Citrix?

kj0

Yes, but from my experience, XenServer is crap. We run all our customers off XenApp, but our entire backend runs on vSphere. We do have 1 customer who uses XenDesktop, but they were a specialty case.

For presenting Apps to customers, citrix is a better fit, but vSphere is much easier to manage and has great support for 3rd party applications.

We were looking at VDI and Horizon is the clear winner for us, but it comes with the ability to integrate with XenApp in version 6.


*I guess for your argument of competing products, what about running Windows on Mac?

DPG

egrizzly wrote: »

...so it is a fact then that you can have a purely Citrix environment without a trace of VMware, as well as a purely VMware environment without a trace of Citrix?

You could also have a 100% Microsoft environment with Hyper-V.

markulous

As others have mentioned it can be a pure environment of one vendor or a mixed one.

The biggest downside of a mixed environment is from a support point of view. If you have a problem and you need to go to a vendor, they'll have a tendency to either point fingers at each other or at the very least you'll have to disable the other vendors stuff to rule that out.

I'd probably just pick whichever one fits your needs the best.

TheProf

Both Citrix and VMware products can complement each other, they can also compete with each other. It really depends on the situation.

tbgree00

VMware has a lot more industry support for plugins, apis, etc. I am sure Xenserver is close but I know a lot of vSphere only applications.

Citrix XenApp/Xendesktop have some killer features that Horizon hasn't responded to yet. Netscaler is awesome and as of yet I don't know of a way to load balance Horizon as simply. Horizon is significantly cheaper per user and improving with every release.

It's all a matter of perspective, design, and support competencies

thenjduke

egrizzly wrote: »

So the correct statement would have been that "VMware is needed in order to run Citrix"

Completely false. You can run any Hypervisor with XenApp/XenDesktop. XenServer is Citrix Product sort of which is Hypervisor. The statement you heard is total BS. Actually the only product they compete with is XenDesktop and VMware View/Horizon

matlabthin

Both Citrix and VMware are more interested in competing with each other than actually listening to customers. There are lots of alternatives out there such as AppliDis from Systancia which offer more value, real world features and better support.

scott28tt

matlabthin wrote: »

Both Citrix and VMware are more interested in competing with each other than actually listening to customers.

Working at VMware as I do, it's refreshing to see so many product decisions made as a direct result of customer feedback, actually.

DPG

scott28tt wrote: »

Working at VMware as I do, it's refreshing to see so many product decisions made as a direct result of customer feedback, actually.

[h=1]vRAM entitlement [/h]

scott28tt

DPG wrote: »

vRAM entitlement

Ah yes the joys of vRAM - thankfully dropped in the very next point release - as customers didn't like it.