NetScaler Reviews

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 are a Citrix solution adviser and one of the main Citrix partners in Bangkok, Thailand. We use Citrix NetScaler ADC to get user access to business applications on desktop devices. 

With Citrix NetScaler ADC we can centralize desktop application management for everything.

For desktop application management, I recommend the NetScaler edition. This product is like a Swiss army knife. Citrix NetScaler ADC supports the education front-end. 

It mobilizes everything in and out, leading over bandwidth and manages all of the applications. We use it for front-end crafting.

There are a lot of features. It has to keep up with the demands of the network for complete file management. Citrix should improve the documentation. It is not really clear how to set up many features to our advantage. When we setup Citrix NetScaler ADC, we have to figure it out by ourselves without a lot of documentation. 

More than five years.

Rules configuration is the key issue for stability. We can get a lot of rule-based configuration and risk management tools with the platform.

Scalability is really cool because NetScaler isn't tied to any complexity or hard time model. It creates a delivery unit and every platform uses it.

Citrix NetScaler ADC is really flexible. We have lots of customers using it. We have banking, financial, software, themes, energy companies, etc. using it. We have from ten to 100+ clients deployed with Citrix NetScaler ADC. 

Technical support from Citrix is pretty good and they respond pretty fast, but the issue is that when we have some configurations that are problematic, they don't always know how to fix them.

When we integrate Citrix NetScaler with an app or desktop, the technical support from Citrix doesn't know how to configure NetScaler. They don't collaborate well. Their communication is sometimes lacking. They speak too fast. Overall, though, Citrix provides good support.

We started as a Citrix client at first. We used NetScaler in the very beginning. For a long time, we have only used this one product.

The installation and deployment of Citrix NetScaler ADC are easier than the competitors. It is not complex. It can be complex, but you can decide to make it not complex. 

The deployments for each project depends on customer requirements. Some take one month, others resolve in two to four months.

For the deployment of Citrix NetScaler ADC, about two or three people is enough. Wiring is simple but the hard part is the orchestration. 

We completed the integration by ourselves.

Licensing is adequate. I wanted to have a more prominent license, but until I do they don't give enough support. The additional cost would be too much. 

If NetScaler is broken, we can open tickets very quickly and request shipment for the new unit or a spare part replacement.

Citrix NetScaler already has tons of features, already too many. We want any new advanced features that they release. One thing that scares me is that with existing products, Citrix does not have detailed documentation ready before they release. Otherwise, it would be better. From my experience, when Citrix launches something new there are a lot of bugs, a lot of errors, required patches, and no documentation. You have to get help. 

Citrix needs to create better documentation. Sometimes when I enable NetScaler, it makes the box crash randomly. I have to wait for three or four release cycles to fix it. The introduction of new features from Citrix for NetScaler always has a lot of problems. 

I would rate Citrix NetScaler eight or nine out of 10. To make the product better, Citrix needs to provide full documentation for each user with video tutorials. Configuration scenarios and demos would also be helpful. We have a lot of customer demand for this better documentation and setting up Citrix NetScaler is really complicated.

From a NetScaler perspective, in terms of LTM, not GSLB, NetScasler has performed very well. In comparison to F5, it holds its own.

For some of my deployments, NetScaler has been strictly a replacement to get something new in. It was cheaper than F5. We took a chance on it. The return on investment is the fact that we spent less money on it. It does do its job and it holds well against F5.

I can turn on features without actually owning a license. I can test them out, I can use them for a while, and then I can be licensed up. That's awesome. I don't have to have a license immediately before I can start to deploy things rapidly, rapid deployment is a plus.

When I compare it to F5 from a hardware or software perspective, they both have their glitches. From a software perspective, either one is not without code bugs.

From an SDX perspective, having the ability to spin up a VPX, the way we spin up our regular features, quickly and have a 60-day trial while we spin up VPXs will give us the opportunity to do more proof of concept work quickly without having to buy the license and download the VPX. A feature like this would be helpful. 

I would also like to have video tutorials so that when you click the help link, you have the option to go to the Citrix forum and get information and help from other people and other users. Something that points you out to a tutorial video link that is a general overview. 

I liked the fact that is NetScaler out-of-the-box is intuitive. You can catch on fairly quickly. Especially when you're doing an advanced alert. You cannot do a re-direct quickly without going through some documentation and if nobody's done it before, they don't know what you're talking about. That is when a help link would be useful that could direct you to the right tutorial video and then it could point you directly after that video to further direction and explanation. Straight to the meat of things. Something like a quick video tip tutorial would be great. Whereas if you're an F5 customer, you don't get something like this and you do have DevCentral that you can go to get information, but it requires you to read through many documents and comb through trying to configure something that is complex. They should deliver the information quickly to end users to make it even faster and more efficient to deliver our own applications and services to customers.

Video files can be large, they don't necessarily have to be on the box itself, but even through a link that quickly goes to their website or YouTube, whatever platform, could work. 

I would like to see them make it easier to do some of the more complex things. For example, a web re-direct requires two pieces to it. You have two ports and when people want to go to a web page, they just type in the webpage that on the backend will redirect them to a secure link. The initial setup of that is cumbersome because you have to do it twice. There are things that can be replicated. The IP address, for example, is the same. This change would go a long way. Don't make me do it twice and don't make me have to read tons of documentation to figure out how to do it. Ease of configuration for some of the more complex processes would be a good improvement. 

It has high stability. I deployed these in hospitals where lives matter. The contention was whether or not to go with F5 because it's the leader in the marketplace and they have 70% of the market shares. Even though NetScaler is big, it still doesn't hold the fair market share. NetScaler is the underdog but it is very stable. I've seen it in hospital environments where lives matter, it's held its own, it does what it says it's going to do and it does it well. It's certainly a top contender, if not an equal contender with its counterpart, F5. 

Scalability is very impressive. The way it works is that you can collapse everything on to a couple of platforms, small, medium, and large. The small one is obviously an initial buy-in. The mid one is fairly powerful and is bigger than an 8920. You are limited on the hardware. You get 64 and you get 32 out of the box, which is what you paid for but you can license up the 64. On the other platform, you can start off at 32 with the initial buy-in and then license up from there for a max of around 256 gig. The way they have it is that you are locked in from a hardware perspective.

Their technical support is decent. It could use some improvement. Help desks and technical support are good but you can tell that there's been turnover. We'll have complex issues that we're trying to work through and we would like somebody who's more experienced and not somebody who had just gone through training. Employee retention on the help desk would go a long way. 

NetScaler does the same thing as an F5 and it's cheaper.

There was some trepidation regarding the initial setup because it's new equipment and nobody has had training for it. We were able to figure it out and stand it up. It took some reading and some calls to tech support, but they were helpful when we were first setting it up.

There are the regular license costs and you also have to pay for licenses if you want more DPXs or whatever. A standard DPX is fairly cheap. It's around $7,000. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten because nobody is a ten. I would give it a nine if it was a little easier to pick up. Out of the box it's easy. Anybody who's an engineer can usually pick it up or if they've had previous load balancing experience, it's easy. Obviously, not everybody has that kind of experience. 

Our primary use case is for proxy firewalling. 

In South Africa, we're going through load-shedding. When our primary link goes down I can still get to my Cisco devices and the NetScaler devices on-prem because of the SDN solution. If the internet connection at one of the branches goes down, we can still route them, they still get internet based on the SDN solution through one of the other sites. They can carry on working.

We incorporated all three because of the fact that we have one central proxy server and everything's on an SDN, so we can get any device anywhere anytime.

Security could be improved because then I can get rid of my Cisco firewalls. If they improve the security then I could run my security, my proxy, my firewalling and my SDN solution on one device instead of having to have multiple devices.

We have 55,000 people around the country and we have plans to roll the solution out worldwide.

The initial setup was complex because we've got different applications so the firewalling needs to be done properly and then we actually do IP subnet changes at certain times. We decided to go to all sites. We did a subnet change on all sites and then we deployed NetScaler. We did the head office first and then we went site by site.

Deployment between nine sites around the country took about four weeks. 

We only require one person for maintenance. Deployment took three people. 

The standard licensing fees work in the way that you get one license with it for whatever you're going to be utilizing it for. We integrated the firewall, the proxy services, and the SDN.

We also looked at FortiGate and Palo Alto. 

The advice I would give somebody researching this solution is to do your research properly and see what's the best solution for the company and the company's needs before you make a decision. You can't just randomly pick a device. You have to do your investigations first. Put in proof of concepts, speak to your seniors. You must tell them what exactly is your company requirements and which device is going to suit those requirements the best.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use it for load balancers. 

It has helped us to increase the resiliency and performance of the application.

There are multiple features that I have found to be valuable including load balancing, supply authentication, web for application firewall, and the reverse proxy.

The technical support has room for improvement. 

Stability is amazing. 

Scalability is amazing. There are 1,000 plus employees that are using it. Anybody from the CEO to the technicians or the receptionists.

The initial setup was straightforward. We only required one staff member for the deployment. 

You get the value for your money. There aren't any hidden fees. 

It's one of the best application delivery controllers available in the market and it requires very minimal administrative effort to manage it.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

This product helps with load balancing. As an engineer, I help implement this for our company.

It helps with load balancing. 

The product is stable. 

It can be a complex setup in some cases. 

I do not have any experience with the pricing of the product. 

In comparison to F5 BIG-IP, this is the best solution. It is the best product out there. 

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.

We are using it for two-factor authentication for our Citrix architecture, for secure access to our internal applications. It is mostly for admins who use it for remote access, as well as some users.

We do not use it as a web application firewall. We are running a virtual edition, not an appliance.

The most valuable feature, absolutely, is its high-security. This product is based on Unix and there have been no problems since we started using it in 2015.

Occasionally, our admin has to use the command line. If they could only use the Web GUI it would be better.

There have been no issues with stability.

We have created two support tickets and our problems were successfully solved. The support is very good.

Set up was done by our partner and there was no problem with configuration. And most of our upgrades are done by our local partner and there have been no problems.

We are quite happy with price. It's not too high.

I give it a nine out of 10 because there have been no problems since 2015, from a security point of view.