Hardware drivers
Important:
Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 Cumulative Update 1 becomes End of Life on June 25, 2025. Plan your upgrade to XenServer 8 now to ensure a smooth transition and continued support. For more information, see Upgrade.
If you are using your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops license files to license your Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 Cumulative Update 1 hosts, these license files are not compatible with XenServer 8. Before upgrading you must acquire XenServer Premium Edition socket license files to use with XenServer 8. These socket license files are available as an entitlement of the Citrix for Private Cloud, Citrix Universal Hybrid Multi-Cloud, Citrix Universal MSP, and Citrix Platform License subscriptions for running your Citrix workloads. Citrix customers who have not yet transitioned to these new subscriptions can request to participate in a no-cost promotion for 10,000 XenServer Premium Edition socket licenses. For more information, see XenServer.
If you do not get a compatible license for XenServer 8 before upgrading, when you upgrade your hosts they revert to the 90-day Trial Edition. Trial Edition provides the same features as Premium Edition with some limitations. For more information, see XenServer 8 Licensing Overview.
We collaborate with partner organizations to provide drivers and support for a wide range of hardware. For more information, see the Hardware Compatibility List.
To support this hardware, your installation of Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 Cumulative Update 1 includes third-party drivers that have been certified as compatible with Citrix Hypervisor. A list of the drivers included in-box with your initial Citrix Hypervisor installation is given in the summary article Driver versions for XenServer and Citrix Hypervisor.
Updates to drivers
We regularly deliver updated versions of these drivers as driver disk ISO files. For example, these updates can be provided to enable new hardware or resolve issues with existing hardware.
Driver disk ISO files are released on the website https://support.citrix.com. You can find these updates in the following places:
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The latest update to a driver is listed in the summary article Driver versions for XenServer and Citrix Hypervisor.
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Use the search on the support.citrix.com site to find updated versions for the driver you need.
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Subscribe to the Citrix Hypervisor software updates RSS feed to be informed of new drivers and hotfixes as they are released.
Even though we distribute the drivers and their source code for our customers to use, the hardware vendor owns the driver source files.
Support for drivers
Citrix Hypervisor supports only drivers that are delivered in-box with the product or are downloaded from https://support.citrix.com. Drivers provided by third-party websites, including drivers with the same name or version number as those drivers provided by us, are not supported.
Note:
The only exception to this restriction are the drivers that NVIDIA provides to enable vGPU support. For more information, see NVIDIA vGPU.
Other drivers provided by NVIDIA, for example, the Mellanox drivers, are only supported with Citrix Hypervisor when distributed by us.
Do not download drivers from your hardware vendor website, even if the driver has the same version number as the one provided by Citrix Hypervisor. These drivers are not supported.
Before a driver can be supported with Citrix Hypervisor, it must be certified with us and released through one of the approved mechanisms. This certification process ensures that the driver is of a format required to be installable in a Citrix Hypervisor environment and that it is compatible with Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 CU1.
What if a driver I need isn’t supported?
If your hardware vendor recommends that you install a specific driver version that is not available in-box or on the https://support.citrix.com website, request that the vendor contacts us to certify this version of the driver with Citrix Hypervisor.
We provide the vendors with certification kits that they can use to test updated versions of their drivers that are required by the shared customer base of Citrix Hypervisor and the hardware vendor. After the vendor provides us with the certification test results, we validate that those results show no issues or regressions in the updated version of the driver. The driver version is now certified with Citrix Hypervisor and we publish the driver through https://support.citrix.com.
For more information about the certification process the vendor must follow, see the article Hardware Compatibility List explained.
Installing driver disks
You can install a driver disk by one of the following methods: