Question : XenServer Vs. Hyper V

This what I have at the moment.  4 Dell Servers 3 are exactly the same r710 and 1 is a pe2950.
I also have dell md3000i SAN.  Right now I have 2 of the r710 rinning 2008 server and the other r710 running Xenserver 5.6.  The PE2950 is running SBS2003 which I will be taking out of service and up grading to 2008 server after I upgrade to 2010 exchange server and move my file server to one of the other 2008 servers.  I had to reconfigure my SAN so I am at a cross roads and want to get some opinons about my next move.  I will be running Xen desktop and Xenapp.  Would it be better to run Hyper V or Xenserver?  My thought was it would be easier to move the VM's around if I needed to make any changes to the servers or had any problems come up.  Before I had to reconfigure my SAN which was storeing my Xenserver VM's  I had to do alot of work because I didn't have a backup Xenserver with the same hardware.  It worked out in the end but it was a pain.  I know Xen Destop and Xen App willl work with Hyper V but I guess I want opinons on if the difference between Xenserver and Hyper V is great enough to stick with XenServer.  We curently don't run any other OS then Microsoft products.  Any help would be appreciated!

Answer : XenServer Vs. Hyper V

Hey all,

        Just to throw in my 2 cents here. Citrix and Microsoft are huge partners here. They dont compete, they go to market together. Either hypervisor will suit just fine. Citrix FULLY supports XenDesktop on Hyper-V.

        That being said, if you are purchasing XenDesktop enterprise, you actually get Essentials for Hyper-V AND essentials for XenServer included in the pricing. This is the paid for version of the XenServer hypervisor totally included for unlimited use for your entire Citrix environment.

         Citrix does indeed have a leg up from a feature standpoint compared to Hyper-V. The argument about being able to use SCVMM and everything else in the MDOP suite is almost a non point because all the Hyper-V management tools work with XenServer as well.

       Something really cool that you will ONLY get on the Hyper-V hypervisor is the ability to use the RemoteFX display protcol. Now im not saying RemoteFX is better than ICA, but I have been hearing some great things about RemoteFX over the LAN. it is not a WAN friendly protocol however.

        One other thing to mention, I do not believe Hyper-V is tuned to run Terminal Services/ XenApp environments. You may loose concurrency here. XenServer will run that workload better.

      Anyway you go, is going to be totally fine. All these great Microsoft/Citrix tools inter operate well. Microsoft has some fantastic monitoring suites that go way beyond some of the monitoring capabilities of the native Citrix tools. Citrix tools monitor Citrix tech, and do a great job at it. Microsoft monitoring tools will go way way way beyond the citrix environment.