I recently had the opportunity to chat with Michael Shuster and Todd Hsu from Ferroque Systems about their experience with migrating customers from VMware to XenServer.
Ferroque Systems has been a longstanding Citrix partner since 2010, with XenServer consulting experience dating back to around the same time.
They estimate that they have deployed XenServer for 50+ enterprise and midmarket customers. They are seeing revitalized interest from customers wanting to move their Citrix workloads from VMware to XenServer – due to the “outrageous price increases” after the recent Broadcom acquisition.
The main driver for many of the customers that Ferroque helped move from VMware to XenServer was the significant cost savings, even prior to the Broadcom acquisition. In addition to not wanting to pay the “vTax”, Todd and Mike noted the Citrix optimizations, the simplicity of XenServer, and graphics capabilities as secondary drivers.
“The combination of XenServer graphics capabilities and Citrix optimizations makes XenServer the perfect choice for customers that have more demanding requirements in terms of their VDI performance.” –Todd Hsu, President at Ferroque Systems
In helping customers make the transition, Ferroque helps customers prepare their Citrix images for XenServer. Ferroque can help you optimize your XenServer environment for Citrix workloads, with capabilities such as PVS Accelerator and Intellicache.
They also help educate customers on the differences in administering VMware vs XenServer.
“XenServer is just dramatically simpler. You can adapt fairly quickly once you understand that some concepts are different in the two products. There’s far less components to be deployed versus a full-blown VMware environment and it’s fairly easy to get up to speed on the management experience.” -Michael Shuster, CEO at Ferroque Systems
Michael had a great example of an Engineering firm that looked to Citrix and XenServer to help deliver graphic-accelerated workloads. The firm was faced with the challenge of not only managing and maintaining $2 million in high-end graphic workstations, but also making the apps and data available to geographically distributed construction sites – that are temporary in nature and are constantly moving to new locations. Leveraging Citrix and XenServer to virtualize their CAD applications enabled the firm to save money on expensive workstations, save time on managing the workstations, and gave the firm the business agility to operate more efficiently with a remote and dispersed workforce.
Here are some highlights of additional customers that Ferroque has helped implement XenServer:
- An auto insurance company with 5k Citrix user and 150 XenServer hosts with the main driver of cost savings against their VMware renewal.
- A Canadian healthcare organization with 40k+ Citrix users standing to save millions of dollars in hypervisor costs by transitioning to XenServer.
- A Telecom customer with roughly 5k Citrix users that saved $5 million on their VMware renewal (pre-Broadcom).
- Several manufacturing customers and a call center company each with several hundred to a thousand users and similar and drivers of wanting to maximize their investments in what they had access to and reduce their overall operating costs.
As Todd and Michael noted that cost savings is a key driver for customers moving to XenServer, they estimate that they have conservatively saved their customers over $50 million on VMware renewals over the years.
“We’ve worked with a lot of public and non-profits organizations that have limited budgets. The opportunity to save millions on renewals just makes sense. It’s a no-brainer for a lot of these companies to move to XenServer.” –Todd Hsu, President at Ferroque Systems
I asked Michael why customers should consider Ferroque for their XenServer implementation project:
“We have the knowledge and experience of XenServer at an enterprise-level and we have numerous former Citrix employees on staff who have consulted on many VMware to XenServer migrations for Citrix workloads for well over a decade. We even have a former XenServer SME with us who has participated in the development and feedback of the latest release of XenServer.” -Michael Shuster, CEO at Ferroque Systems
Ferroque describes themselves as an “end-user infrastructure company”. In addition to Citrix and XenServer consulting, Ferroque has a full suite of professional and managed services spanning cloud, infrastructure, networking, storage, endpoint management, application management, and digital employee experience monitoring.
To get in touch with Ferroque for your XenServer implementation project, you can visit https://www.ferroquesystems.com/expertise/xenserver/ or reach out to them at hello@ferroquesystems.com.