Citrix Hypervisor feature matrix

Last updated: March 6, 2023

Please refer to the sections below detailing Citrix Hypervisor features by product edition and release type. For further information on the lifecycle milestones of the Current Release (CR) and Long Term Service Release (LTSR), please refer to the Citrix Hypervisor Lifecycle Milestones page.

Comprehensive application and desktop hypervisor management platform

Citrix Hypervisor is the most highly optimized hypervisor platform for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops workloads. With tight feature integration throughout the stack, Citrix Hypervisor exposes hardware-level features for a high definition user experience, greater security and simplified operational management.
 Containing comprehensive, enterprise-class features and performance, Citrix Hypervisor can handle different workload types, mixed operating systems and complex storage or networking requirements with ease, and for the most demanding business use cases. 

Citrix DaaS and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops customers (all editions) are entitled to the Citrix Hypervisor Premium edition.

Feature Description    
Standard Premium 8.2
LTSR
64-bit Hypervisor The Xen Project hypervisor upon which all workloads run.
64-bit Control Domain The 64-bit control domain manages the pooling of resources and workloads running on the host.
Hardware Compatibility
List (HCL) Support
Citrix actively works with hardware OEMs to ensure all commonly used hardware types are tested and supported with Citrix Hypervisor. The HCL of supported hardware can be found at: http://www.citrix.com/Citrix Hypervisor/hcl.
Feature Description    
Standard Premium 8.2
LTSR
Multi Server Management with XenCenter GUI The XenCenter GUI is a Windows based interface that allows for the management of servers and resource pools (collections of servers) in a simple to use scalable manner.
Active Directory Integration For support of multiple user accounts on a server or pool, utilize Microsoft Active Directory services to authentication. This lets Citrix Hypervisor users log into a pool of Citrix Hypervisor hosts using their Windows domain credentials.
Role-Based Administration and Control (RBAC) RBAC allows you to assign users, roles and permissions to control who has access to Citrix Hypervisor hosts. Citrix Hypervisor RBAC maps individual or groups of users to defined, which in turn have associated Citrix Hypervisor permissions.
Citrix Hypervisor vApps vApps provide the ability to group multiple VMs together, to startup, shut down, set HA and recovery order policies, all at the vApp level.
Dynamic Memory Control (DMC) DMC automatically adjusts the amount of memory available for use by a guest VM’s operating system.  By specifying minimum and maximum memory values, a greater density of VMs per host server is permitted.
Performance Reporting and Alerting XenCenter provides the ability to monitor VM workload and host infrastructure performance, for compute, memory, network and disk metrics.  Administrative alerts can also be defined.
Live VM Migration The live migration of VM compute workloads between two different hosts within a resource pool, allows administrators to manually manage the spread of load across their infrastructure and eliminate any outages from planned infrastructure downtime.
Heterogeneous Resource Pools When expanding existing resource pools, it is not always possible to obtain exactly the same hardware or CPUs. This feature enables new hosts and CPU versions to be added to existing pools, with support for all the VM-level features such as live migration you expect.
Live-Patching Live patching enables infrastructure admins to patch the Citrix Hypervisor hypervisor without needing to migrate VMs from the host, shut down or suspend VMs.  
Automated Updates via XenCenter Citrix Hypervisor infrastructure hotfixes are able to be deployed from either the command line or XenCenter, and in batches, automatically downloading the required hotfixes to further simplify management of the hypervisor platform.  
Scheduled Snapshots Scheduled snapshots enables admins to schedule hourly, daily, or weekly snapshots on a VM or group of VMs. It also includes the ability to configure the maximum number of scheduled snapshots, in which the oldest snapshot will be deleted in a rolling fashion, to aid in the lifecycle of snapshot management.
VM Tools for Windows Driver Update
Automated delivery and patching of Citrix Hypervisor’s Windows VM drivers via Windows Update (WSUS), dramatically simplifying management of large scale VM deployments.  
Citrix Hypervisor Conversion Manager With a separately downloadable virtual appliance, IT admins are able to batch migrate VMs from VMware vSphere infrastructures to Citrix Hypervisor. Windows and Linux operating systems can be migrated with minimal steps and effort.  
Dynamic Workload Balancing & Audit Reporting (WLB) WLB gives system administrators deep insight into system performance, allowing infrastructure optimization, host power management and audit reporting.  
Export Pool Resource List This allows for the export to a spreadsheet, of all objects within the infrastructure view of XenCenter.  
Rolling Pool Upgrade (RPU) A XenCenter feature that eliminates downtime when upgrading Citrix Hypervisor hosts. RPU autonomously patches all hosts within a pool, evacuating and repatriating VMs with Live Migration as needed.
Maximum Pool Size Citrix Hypervisor supports a maximum pool size of 64 hosts.

If you are using a clustered pool with GFS2 storage, the pool size is limited to 16
Microsoft Windows Server 2022 guest support 
Support for running VMs with Microsoft Windows Server 2022 operating system.
UEFI Secure boot for Windows VMs* Support for UEFI boot on newly created 64-bit Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, 2019, and 2022 VMs. UEFI boot provides a richer interface for the guest operating systems to interact with the hardware, which can significantly reduce Windows VM boot times.

* New or updated feature within the latest release

Feature Description    
Standard Premium 8.2
LTSR
Basic Network Security Groups Available with an OVS network, security groups is a method of tenant isolation typically used by cloud management products, such as Accelerite CloudPlatform.
Open Virtual Switch (OVS) When used with a controller appliance, OVS networks are a programmable networking standard based on OpenFlow and sFlow for the collection of statistics.
SR-IOV capable network cards Support for SR-IOV-capable networks cards delivers high performance networking for virtual machines. Citrix Hypervisor enables the use of Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) to allow a single PCI device to appear as multiple PCI devices on the physical system.  
Efficient Multicast Support The use of IGMP snooping to direct IPv4 multicast traffic only to those VMs that have registered to listen to that specific multicast.
Feature Description    
Standard Premium 8.2
LTSR
Host Failure Protection High Availability (HA) HA allows for the localized recovery of VMs and/or vApps due to infrastructure hardware failure. HA also ensures that a host re-election takes place, should a pool master fail.
Site Recovery Manager Designed to enable customers to recover VMs and/or vApps from catastrophic hardware failure of the compute, storage and/or network layers.  This is typically the loss of significant portions, if not all, of the infrastructure at a given location.
Feature Description    
Standard Premium 8.2
LTSR
Shared Storage Connectivity Connectivity to all types of local and shared storage, including EXT3, NFS v3 & v4, iSCSI, and FC HBA & open-FCoE.
SMB Storage Connectivity Create Citrix Hypervisor Storage Repositories (SRs) based on SMB storage, whether a hardware based array, or a Windows based storage server.  
GFS2 Storage Repository GFS2 is a Linux-based shared disk file system for block storage. Enabling the option for GFS2 as a Storage Repository delivers reduced storage costs with thin provisioning for block storage capabilities.  
Greater than 2TB VDI Ability to create virtual disk images larger than 2 TiB on GFS2 SRs.      
Software-boot-from-iSCSI Boot Citrix Hypervisor hosts from software-implemented iSCSI within Cisco UCS fabrics.
Shared Nothing Live
VM Migration
Live migration of both a VM’s compute and storage, between different hosts and storage types. This can be within or across different resource pools and allows administrators complete flexibility to manually re-tier storage and eliminate planned infrastructure outages.
Storage Live Migration The live migration of a VM’s storage, enabling administrators to select a new target SR for each of VM’s VDIs and moving these live without downtime and without moving the compute aspect of the VM.
Intellicache Leveraging local host storage, Citrix Hypervisor caches reads and non-persistent writes when using a shared desktop image.  This mitigates many of the off-host IOPS reducing the need for high-end arrays to support large scale infrastructures.
MCS Read Cache When using Machine Creation Services (MCS) images for virtualized desktop and application workloads, the reads can be cached in host RAM, providing fast, scalable access and dramatically reducing off-host IOPS, thereby reducing the need for high-end arrays to support large scale infrastructures.  
PVS-Accelerator The integration of a Citrix Hypervisor Provisioning Services (PVS) host cache dramatically reduces solution network traffic, enabling fewer PVS servers to handle the same volume of VMs, yet with faster VM time-to-boot. PVS (standalone license or Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops entitlement) is required.
 
Changed Block Tracking Changed Block Tracking API's for Citrix Hypervisor enables backup vendors to develop more efficient backup solutions, so that only changed blocks are backed up after the initial VM backup.  
Feature Description    
Standard Premium 8.2
LTSR
GPU Pass-through Enables high-end 3D graphics within VMs and VDI deployments for variety of use cases, including CAD/CAM, HPC and Citrix Virtual Apps published applications.  Hardware GPU providers include Intel, AMD & NVIDIA, with each GPU having a one-to-one relationship with a particular VM.
GPU Virtualization Enables virtualized 3D GPU support for multiple VMs per host GPU, with the most comprehensive GPU vendor support. Offering superior performance when compared to software emulation, many users can leverage enhanced graphics for all supporting applications types.  
vGPU Live Migration Enables live migration of GPU-enabled running VMs. vGPU Live Migration improves user experience by enabling administrators to rebalance GPU-enabled VMs across pool hosts to improve VM performance. vGPU Live Migration also enhances user productivity, enabling users to remain productive during unexpected maintenance. vGPU Live Migration is available upon release of supported software and graphics cards from GPU vendors.  
Disk and memory snapshots for vGPU enabled VMs When a disk and memory snapshot of a vGPU-enabled VM is taken the state of the VM includes the vGPU state.  
Multiple NVIDIA vGPU support For NVIDIA GPUs and drivers that support multiple vGPU, you can configure a single VM to use multiple virtual GPUs concurrently. These additional vGPUs can be used to perform computational processing.  
Feature Description    
Standard Premium 8.2
LTSR
Nested Virtualization for Bromium Secure Platform Nested Virtualization support for Bromium’s Secure Platform solution. Using micro-virtualization technology, VMs are sandboxed against threats by silicon enforced hypervisor isolation.