Question : Citrix on Zen Server vs VMWARE vs Hyper-V

We are in the process of upgrading our Citrix environment and our vendors/consultants are really pushing us to go with Zen Server for our virtualization.  They claim that Zen Server is going to take over the virtual world and before long VMWare will be a thing of the past.  I know this is probably a sales pitch and should be taken with a grain of salt.

I realize Zen Server was built to support Citrix and there are probably some hooks in there that make it the most optimized solution for Citrix.  We are a smaller company that has a smaller Citrix implementation and everything else we have running virtualized is on VMWare and it would be nice to keep it that way (or move towards Hyper-V possibly).  We plan to have 2 virtualized presentation servers each running on their own physical host, and then also use those physical hosts for other virtual machines as well.

Two questions.  Is it safe to run Citrix on VMWare and Hyper-V?  Also, are there any real good reasons for a smaller company with a smaller Citrix implementation to stick with Zen Server?

Answer : Citrix on Zen Server vs VMWARE vs Hyper-V

I have been researching XenServer quite extensively in the last couple of days.

First of all, the claim that XenServer is going to eliminate VMWare is bluster.  There is nothing at the moment which suggests that is going to happen.

That being said, XenServer is a very good solution.  It is, however, new to Citrix, having been purchased only a couple of years ago from an open source company.

I do not know the ramifications of running XenApp presentation server on top of VMWare or Hyper-V, but I suspect that they would both run fine.  I also don't doubt that Citrix XenServer is optimized to be the least troublesome on which to run XenApp.

On the bright side, Hyper-V, the latest VMWare ESXi and XenServer, as of weeks ago, are all free applications.  Your vendors and consultants probably want to sell you maintenance, support, and management applications, but if you have time and are so inclined, they are all available free for production or to test.

Of the applications, I would rate them from least flexible to most flexible:

Hyper-V
XenServer
ESXi

On the other hand, that is also how I would rate them in ascending complexity.  You may just want to stick with Hyper-V if it will work-- my main complaint about Hyper-V is the limited support for non Microsoft OSes, but if there was any one product that is likely to make the others "a thing of the past" it would be Microsoft's product.