NetScaler Reviews

I work as a senior sales engineer and business developer manager and we distribute the Citrix NetScaler AppFirewall. My job is in presales and I'm also a distributor, assisting the company partners.

Our customers are generally enterprise and public companies and our primary use of the product is for security and work balancing applications. Implementation of the product assists with all the applications and the customer's communication requirements. NetScaler can do a lot of things. We make a point of always using the latest version of the product.

I think that the work balancing applications are the most valuable feature. The licensing model that Citrix has implemented is very good. It's a pay-by-use system. 

The product could be improved by making it easier to use and easier to implement. We've had some difficult problems with that. 

An additional feature they could include more of a firewall, as you would find with Checkpoint, Fortinet or Palo Alto firewalls, which all have specific features for security. It would be good if they could include some kind of technical analysis in the next version but I don't know that is part of the Citrix strategy. 

The Citrix technical support is very good and the support from the company sales engineer is very good too. 

The initial setup can be problematic. The length of time it takes to implement really depends on the project. It normally takes around two weeks.

Our company carries out the implementation, the integration of the solution on the customer's infrastructure. In Portugal, we have a lot of enterprise and public sector implementations and a lot of different products available for mounting infrastructure. Sometimes the older implementations and on-prem implementations haven't been done properly and we need to manage this for the customer and for the implementers. You need to know very well what the customer has in order to implement the solution. 

The deployment model depends on the customer and normally it's carried out by the customer, because NetScaler in Portugal, where I am, isn't well known so we do a proof of concept first for a couple of months and then after the installation, configuration and the customer approves the product, then the department delivers it. 

There are some security problems, there's are DOS problems, different kinds of attacks. Another one is for load balancing the charge of the application because NetScaler is a very good solution to load balance the load off the application itself, from Citrix or from another solution. These are the best cases, security and load balancing.

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

Our primary use case for the product is server load balancing, specifically the application level.

We are able to offer more support to our customers.

The most valuable feature is the capability of performing load balancing in a virtual environment.

They need to implement and integrate security solutions. Specifically, a web application firewall.

I would give this solution nine out of ten for stability. It is not perfect because at times I was faced with an issue where the application was getting a lot more traffic than is desirable, and I can see Citrix having issues with this.

We have close to fourteen hundred clients using this solution. We expect this to increase, but it is dependent on clients' needs in terms of load balancing.

Some of our clients use the F5 load balancing solution, but that is only ten to fifteen of approximately fourteen hundred clients.

It is a pretty easy setup. You don't need to change anything related to your IT configuration, MAC addresses, or switching tables.

We implement this solution for our clients. We use a template based approach, so normally it can be deployed in a fraction of minutes. One person is sufficient for the deployment and maintenance of this product.

I recommend this product to customers because they have a ninety day free-trial period. This is a good solution for people who also have a budget constraint.

We have a five year platinum licensing agreement, which does not incur additional costs of any kind.

I would rate this product eight out of ten.

We use Citrix NetScaler for policy URLs for web applications and RDP for Windows servers.

Reducing the content searching to publishing your web application, the OTP for two-factor authentication is the most valuable feature of NetScaler.

I wanted to use most features of NetScale, like the Web Application Firewall, but I need to learn how to use it. When we want to use OTP for two-factor authentication, it first appears on the authentication page where we can put the credentials. Then, we are directed to the application page and type the credentials again. But we want to use the OTP and access the web application without typing the credentials again. Typically, if we have an issue in the configuration and ask for a support request, that support doesn't help. They only talked about new implementations and charged me for it.

The customers needed help but did not find the web useful for the tool.

The technical support could be better. Whenever I contacted support, I rarely got the solution that we needed. And most of the time, I finished fixing the problem by looking on the internet or by finding documents about the problem on Google.

I have been using Citrix NetScaler for seven years.

It is a stable solution. It crashed only once, four years ago. We're using the DSLD configuration with two load balancers, two carriers, and two ISPs.

The technical support is bad. Whenever I contacted support, I rarely got the solution that we needed.

I rate it five out of ten.

Neutral

Previously, I used Microsoft TMG but then switched to NetScaler since it is a better solution.

The initial setup was complex initially. The first time it took about six months to be deployed. But it's straightforward now and takes only a couple of hours. Around four to five people were needed to complete the deployment.

It was implemented through an in-house team.

There is a return on investment using the solution.

The solution is undoubtedly very good, but it is expensive.

My experience with the support is not good. Owing to its poor technical support, I rate the solution seven out of ten.

We are using Citrix ADC for SSL offloads and security, secure remote access, loads balancing, and application firewall, web application firewall.

The most valuable features of Citrix ADC are load balancing and application firewall.

Overall the price of Citrix ADC could be more competitive.

I have been using Citrix ADC for approximately 10 years.

The stability of Citrix ADC is good.

Citrix ADC is highly scalable. You can upgrade it and put increase the bandwidth or add more security features. You can start from the basic standard version, up to the Platinum version.

Citrix ADC's initial setup was simple. The full process took approximately a half-day.

We did the implementation of Citrix ADC in-house because we have the Citrix consultancy services for our customers. They utilize our services on-premise, and in-house. However, typically, the end-user customers, for private/public cloud,  have to have some deep technical knowledge. It's not for every IT person to implement. That's why the consulting team is needed to implement these kinds of solutions because they're very sensitive and high critical position in terms of application firewall, et cetera.

We have one person who handles the support of our Citrix ADC. For our customers, we use one person for their support.

Citrix ADC could improve the price and make it less expensive, other competitors have a better prices. This would allow Citrix ADC to keep dominating the market.

It is a very good solution.

I rate Citrix ADC a nine out of ten.

My primary use case is for disaster recovery.

The best feature of Citrix is its track record of stability in its features.

An area for improvement would be the difficulty in finding information about standard licensing costs over the internet. They should provide some reference prices on the net to be quickly referred to. I would also like to see virtualization of the ad systems in the next release.

Citrix is a pretty robust and stable product. It has an edge because it's more stable than other solutions like Avaya and VMWare.

This solution is scalable.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

We have one project for our telecom and another for our port to manage traffic.

In our country, it is not possible to implement in the cloud.

• Loadbalancing
• It has disaster recovery functionalities.

We are working the Oracle to publish all the web applications on the platform in the next phase of the application. This will be good for us because there are additional security features added into the platform from the website.

The reporting is not so good. They don't have an application to connect the logs.

The stability is good. If there is a problem, the load will be shifted to other sites automatically, which has been a good experience for us.

It is working now at two sites.

The technical support is fine. I would rate the technical support as a five (out of five). They gave us extra support during the deployment phase.

We used the documentation to deploy it. 

When we deploy the product, we also buy the Professional Services from Citrix. Another engineer and I also worked on these products.

We have all the features and functions of Citrix because we have a premium license.

For partners, NetScaler is not as expensive price-wise versus F5. The biggest difference between NetScaler and F5 is the support. F5 has better support, and it is important to have good support. I have recommended to NetScaler that they improve their support.

NetScaler is a good product for partners.

I would rate NetScaler as an eight (out of 10).

Internal Load Balancing and Content switching features are the main reasons for selecting this product.

Imagine providing a brand new Web service that offers persistent client-server connections, IP restriction, URL rewrite (such as remove "/assets/" path from client-side URL path), cache for CSS or JS files and requires security features to be enabled. And do not forget that this service runs on a custom port, but you must publish it using the standard HTTP port, and you only have a public IP address and it's already in use on the NetScaler. You can easily use the GUI to set up all these requirements on the same network device within 20-30 minutes. (If you do the same steps on CLI, it might take less time.)

It depends on your needs. 

• If you need PCI-compliance and have high security requirements, WAF is the most valuable feature. 
• If you need to monitor your load-balancing services with complex types of monitoring, make sure everything is alright, and load balancing is important, Content Switching and Monitoring features are the keys to your needs.
• If you want to provide a lot of static images or data, the Caching feature works best for you.

We have used all the functions. I would say the rewriting and redirection functions are must-have's for us.

We had some bugs in the previous firmware. These were not big issues, but more testing on the firmware would be key to happier customers.

We deployed NSX on our infrastructure last year. It was great, except for the standard load balancer. We were already using Netscaler MPX on our physical level and expected almost the same features from NSX load balancer. But it was really hard to even monitor the services on it, and we did not have time to wait for it to be improved. So we downloaded and tested the trial version of Netscaler VPX. We've already gotten to know the product, have made comparisons with products from other brands, but it did not take long to select it. For now, it is the best solution for us.

The primary use for using it is the wholesale application and VDIs.

I have been working the cost factors, while the performance and application are good, the factory cost brought back to you is not. Therefore, we are currently comparing the product with Microsoft RemoteApp.

The most valuable feature would be the Citrix permanent server.

It is cost-effective, if you consider the permanent server. Also, the management is easy with no downtimes. 

There are some features which are missing.

What I am looking for is something like OneDrive. We are facing an issue with OneDrive on the XenApp and XenDesktop. We can't use OneDrive with what we have. So, a fully, operational OneDrive support is what I am looking for.

Stability is good.

Scalability is good.

We like working with Citrix technical support.

I have been working with Citrix technology for the last 10 to 13 years. We have not switched solutions during this time. 

From a Citrix perspective, it was straightforward. From the application perspective, there are some tweaks that we need to do. So, we are working on those tweaks.

Currently, we are evaluating the cost prospective from the BDA cost prospective. We are evaluating Microsoft and Citrix as they are the leaders in this solution. If you compare Citrix and Microsoft RemoteApp, Citrix is the best compared to RemoteApp. RemoteApp is basically meant for a small business use case.

We are using Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop, but we are planning to now expand into the same product. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Cost
• Performance
• Stability
• Scalability
• High availability.