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. 

We primarily use the solution for network load balancing on the edge of the network. 

The solution's most valuable feature is the content.

The solution is a bit more expensive than some of the available solutions in this region. One solution in particular that I noticed was cheaper was Kemp. 

The solution is very stable. We don't have any downtime or issues of that nature.

The solution is pretty scalable. Right now, we are only using about 40-50% of the solution's capacity. We have about 4,000 users connecting through the system. Currently, we don't plan to increase usage.

Support has been okay so far. We only ever call about two times a year, but each time we get the right help. Once we called about custom features and they supported us quite well.

We previously used Kemp Load Balancer. We still have it as part of our infrastructure. The main difference between the two is the Citrix solution is part of a physical appliance, whereas the Kemp solution is a virtual appliance.

The initial setup was straightforward. We had a very good engineer that handled the implementation.

There are costs in addition to the licensing fees, so the overall price can begin to add up.

I would recommend the solution to people who need the services and features provided by Citrix. It's a wonderful product. We've never had any downtime on our NetScaler solution. I'm pretty happy with it.

I'd rate it nine out of ten.

SSL offloading, load balancing, HTTP analysis and manipulation (HTTP rewrites, inserts, redirects) for web applications. Load balancing other ERP applications and Exchange.

We have a lot of custom web applications that sometimes require custom header insertions.  Some of these apps are externally accessible. In our current network design, we were using a routable address for every external resource that we presented. Via the Content Switching, we are using one routable IP for various systems, preserving our number of allocated public addresses.

HTTP analysis and action. We have a lot of custom web applications that sometimes require custom header insertions. Some of these custom apps are external and, via the Content Switching, we can use one IP and leverage various back-end web app servers.

For the most part, I don’t have complaints about the system and its solution. One of my prior gripes was that documentation and knowledge base articles were disjointed and/or were not complete. Citrix has done a great job over the last two and a half years of enhancing their support material.

I would give the product a nine out of 10. The product is solid and truly is a Swiss army knife. However, getting to use some of the advanced tools, even with the assistance of Citrix support, can be challenging.

I use the solution for its access gateway and endpoint management features to balance services.

The solution's most valuable features are low latency, reverse proxy, content switching, and access gateway.

We face challenges with the solution's firmware upgrades frequently. They should improve this particular area. 

I have been using the solution for nine years.

I rate the solution's stability as an eight. 

It is a very scalable solution. 

The solution's technical support team is good.

The solution's initial setup was straightforward. The deployment takes only a few hours. I rate the process a ten out of ten.

It is an enterprise solution. Thus, its costs are reasonable.

I recommend the solution to others and rate it as a ten. 

The main use of Citrix NetScaler was for application integration. My clients wanted their applications to be managed through Citrix NetScaler.

The most valuable feature of  Citrix NetScaler was the seamless integration. Additionally, the UI is good.

Citrix NetScaler has been recently acquired by another company and the support has been negatively impacted, the solution is at its end of life. The support for the solution could improve. The sales team needs to be improved.

I have used Citrix NetScaler within the last 12 months.

Citrix NetScaler is stable and robust.

Citrix NetScaler is scalable but could improve.

I have three to four customers.

I rate the scalability of Citrix NetScaler a seven out of ten.

The video technical support from Citrix NetScaler was satisfactory.

The initial setup of Citrix NetScaler is straightforward. The process is easier than competitors. The solution took us approximately 20 days to deploy because we had many applications that needed to be scheduled.

The requirement was to provide load balancing of multiple applications and publish all the applications behind Citrix NetScaler.

The license for Citrix NetScaler is on an annual basis and it is reasonably priced.

I would not recommend this solution to others.

I rate Citrix NetScaler an eight out of ten.

We used it to manage a data center hosting environment and had more than 250 HA pairs of Citrix NetScalers (both physical and virtual) to maintain/manage customer environments. Each environment was different, each was a customer-dedicated environment.

This was a standard load-balancing solution provided to our customers. They didn't have many complaints about the way their traffic was being managed. We were able to handle specific requirements for persistence/stickiness.

Content Switching since it provides flexibility for routing traffic as desired to designated real servers. It also provides good geo capabilities through its GSLB feature.

Development team's response time could be better.

No major issues with stability.

Scalability is good with the virtual appliance, where you can easily scale using the appropriate license and match up with the appropriate virtual machine.

We had a mix of makes/models, as we supported a large customer base, such as F5, Cisco CSS. We have never had a case where we had to switch NetScaler out for another make.

Initial setup is straightforward if you know basic networking concepts. It doesn't take a lot of reading to set one up.

I would rate NetScaler as a seven out of 10 for good technical support on routine issues, but any issues that needed the development team's involvement took a long time.

If you don't have very specific requirements such as the ASM that F5 offers, this would do almost all tasks as far as load-balancing is concerned (geo load-balancing as well).

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.

Our primary use case is to provide security and ensure the viability of our services.

The services are almost 100% available to everybody. The solution is invisible for our clients, so by using it, nobody knows that anything is broken because we're hiding the service behind it. It works behind the scenes, in the background, and it keeps everything running smoothly.

The web application firewall which protects our services on the internet, and then of course services like our ability to provide high availability for the services we are offering are the most valuable features. 

The user interface could be more friendly. Some wizards and other documentation for administrators, as well as some use cases, helps us to understand the solution.

The solution is very stable. On the client side, we have several thousand users. In the company itself, I would say there are more than one hundred users.

The solution is very scalable.

Technical support is good.

No, we haven't been using any other solution.

For deployment, it depends on the maturity of the client. If it's the services that are going to be supported by the solution or if it's just a new one, but the number of services is very low, then the implementation would take a week. If you are implementing a major infrastructure project that will support lots of services, then it becomes complicated, so there's no idea really how long it would take.

For our company's size and complexity, I would say it's straightforward.

Most clients, rather rarely, have a dedicated person to maintain just that solution but almost anybody from the operational team can watch it, so I don't know how many people you would need for deployment and maintenance. I haven't done a headcount.

We provide the consultancy ourselves.

This is a type of product that, in terms of security, the moment you implement it, it has an ROI because it secures the home system in the sense that no data is lost. No secrets get out.

There are some add ons to the standard licensing that you can buy for the basic version. You can extend with some add ons, or you can buy the premium version, so it depends on what your clients need. They get the packet and then they can do the add ons.

We were looking at different options according to price. We looked at the F5. The Citrix pricing was good for what it offers.

It's always a really good idea to do a POC. There are companies that are not convinced as to why should they should use something, but a POC is a good way to show why. 

The quality of the service is higher, simply, and that's what you need. So that's why we are using the solution. Also, there are lots of securities that integrate with the solution, so it's good. You can very easily find a way for almost every customer to use it.

I would rate this solution as a 9 out of 10. The performance is very good. The price is also good. You get performance, and lots of features which are very flexible which give the opportunity to provide really advanced support and the quality of the services we are serving from the platform is high.