NetScaler Reviews

The primary use case is a low balancing geo failover. However, there are a lot of use cases that we use it for.

We use it for Citrix NetScaler MPX deployments. It is being used for publishing Citrix XenApp, mostly for load balancing, but we have been evaluating solutions for deploying it in multi-data centers. 

• Global servers
• Load balancing

We need multi-site and DNS failover.

It is difficult to customize. It is more difficult to customize than F5, for example. They have custom iRules that you can write for customized situations. 

I would like to see more integration for single sign-on on the Citrix side. F5 has done a lot of work on single sign-on capabilities, and it seems that NetScaler might be lacking a bit compared to F5.

We have had very good luck with stability. However, we have always deployed in an HA configuration.

Scalability is great. One of the best features of NetScaler is that it can scale out.

Technical support seems very knowledgeable if we have any problems. Support had been good when we needed it. We have not needed it that much, but they are good to work with.

We used Windows Network Low Balancing.

We had a consulting service help us with the setup.

We have been evaluating F5, Citrix, and other ADC products. Citrix is the most expense of all of them.

You need to have somebody who understands application delivery controllers and all their features. If you don't have someone, I would highly recommend training in professional services to help out with it.

We are sort of in the evaluation process of replacing everything with one solution.

• Load balancing business web applications
• Load balancing core infrastructure services e.g. App-V, Ivanti UWM, Citrix Storefront and Director
• Application firewall features WAF for more secure application access
• XenApp/XenDesktop application gateway with two factor authentication
• Use of MAS for analytics and centralised management

• Allows the user to easily scale out application delivery.
• Provides secure remote access.
• Ease of management and business continuity support.
• Powerful, reliable, and feature rich solution all in one appliance.

NetScaler MAS centralised management and analytics makes it is easy to support, manage, monitor, and maintain a NetScaler solution.

It should offer more flexible cost-effective licensing for small to medium sized organizations i.e. a pooled licensing option on entry level MPXs like 5901s.

There have been several uses, but mostly in a data center where security is required and where they can utilize a lot of load-balancing services.

As an architect, I have deployed it in so many areas. Some like to use the SSL portion of it, others, they use the load-balancing. It does a lot more than what people use it for. The one feature that works really well is the SSL VPN. It's very easy to set up and you can go very granular with it. You can define what user groups get what kind of access and the management overhead is very low.

The customization has always been a key area where some improvements are required. In the beginning, everything was for customizing the outer shell of it. You had to use the command-based utility and you had to do a lot of manual work. They have improved it a little bit and now there are some GUI-based functionalities that can be used. However, more can be done that doesn't require a lot of intervention. Right now there are some features, there are some customizations that can be done, but it's still very tedious, very cumbersome, a lot of work. So that could be simplified.

There is one other thing that I would like to address. In every release - and it doesn't matter if it's a minor release or a major release - they keep moving things around and they keep changing the mechanism. So certain things can work in one version one way, and everything works really well, then when you upgrade it to the next version, it breaks everything because they have a new way of doing it. I don't know what can be done in that regard. I have seen it many times: A solution is working fine and then, all of a sudden, you upgrade and bam, now you have to redo everything a different way.

In addition, if they could make the following improvement they would push out more NetScaler. The industry needs to know, or people need to know that NetScaler is not designed just for Citrix products like XenApp and XenDesktop, it can be utilized for everything.

Other than that, the core of the product, or the engine, fits really well. It works well, it's doing really well so I don't see any improvements that are required there.

In connection with what I mentioned in the "Room For Improvement" section, you can go ahead and create some VPN policies that may work really well, just the way you want. For example in version 10.1, the solutions were working just fine. As soon as you upgraded to 11, those solutions were no longer working. You had to go back and redo everything and change the priorities and such.

As long as you choose the right model for a certain use case, you're good to go.

Surprisingly, tech support for NetScaler has been amazing. I have always been able to find, say 95 percent of the time, really good engineers and have been able to get good support. In that regard, there has been much improvement.

In the past, two years back and before that, the support was really not great. Every now and then you would run into some good engineer but the rest of them were pretty basic. They would waste your time. For about a year, a year and a half now, I have been getting really good support.

It's not that I have used other solutions, it's just that in most environments where I have had to do my job or to come up with solutions as a solutions architect, the preferred technology was NetScaler; if not, I would suggest they use it.

However, if they had anything else, for example, F5 or A10 - if that was their preferred method - I have used those as well. So it's not up to me. But for a new customer, for a new build, my suggestion has been to go with NetScaler even if they didn't have Citrix.

The biggest misconception in the industry is that you need NetScaler if you have Citrix in your environment. And if you have any other solution, let's says VMware Horizon View, you want to use something else. But they don't realize you can use NetScaler regardless of whether you have Citrix or not.

It's not that I have switched, I have always used many different technologies, but this happens to be one of my favorites and it's one of the technologies I've been working with for a long time.

It is complex technology and it has always been that way. You really have to know NetScaler well in order for you to capitalize on it. Even though they have given you installation wizards to make things easy, it is still like a hybrid of network and systems all in one package. So you have to know a lot about networking and a lot about systems. In my case, I have been installing this for a long time so for me, it's really not that big of a deal. But for new users, even when they come back after training or even if I have trained them, it takes them a long time before they can get comfortable with it because, as I said earlier, it's a beast of a technology, it has so much in it.

It is true that it is a bit pricey compared to newer technologies coming to the market. For example, A10 is a load balancer that does everything that Citrix can and it does a lot more than what NetScaler does when it comes to the security space, and their prices are so cheap. Every box comes with its own license and support built into it.

When you compare that with NetScaler, you have to buy licenses separately, you have to buy a support agreement that is going to be separate. A small NetScaler, even if it is a VPX which is a virtual server, could cost you close to $150,000 to $200,000 dollars. So the pricing is really high.

The pricing has to come down. They usually have three-year or five-year subscriptions. I sold one to a hospital and the model that they went with cost them $500,000. That's ridiculous. It doesn't have to be so expensive because then a lot of people shy away from buying it. Their budgets are not that huge and so they have to look for financing options. A10 comes with the licenses. I don't know if they can come up with a model that every NetScaler comes with its license. Maybe, depending on however many users people want to put on it, they can have a different type of license and it can be cheaper.

As a solutions architect, when I go to a customer and they tell me: these are the things that we want to do and this is the budget we have, depending upon their budget, I have to choose what is available and what they can afford. In some cases, if they can not afford NetScaler, I have to choose another load balancer for them.

There are SSL offloading options, you have your URL redirects, VPN, SSL VPN. These are the four major options. A lot of people use web traffic so the rewrite and such, those are all part of their web filtering or enhancement.

Every product keeps improving every day and every year. The reason this has been a big technology piece in most data centers is because of the uniqueness of what it does. It's a beast of a technology but most companies, most organizations, they only use maybe 10 percent of it. But it's very popular and it's getting even more popular now that Cisco has started using this product in their UCS.

It's a very heavy-duty product, so if you have a lot of utilization, or if you can use at least half of it, then it's worth buying. It's a very robust and solid product but it really depends upon what the use case is and, of course, the budget.

Once you set it up correctly you never have to go back to change anything ever again. It works as it's supposed to and it's very dependable.

Provides secure remote access to, as well as intelligent load-balancing for, internal resources.

Implemented dual-factor authentication on Outlook Web Access, making it well-protected.

I like the monitoring ability as it enables me to identify when an internal (load-balanced) resource is having issues before it becomes a problem in production.

The policies on the NetScaler can be a bit tricky at times.

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).

I implemented this solution for customers who were looking to achieve high-availability and resiliency of their business servers, through load balancing.

It has improved my customers' base functionality by providing resiliency to their applications that reside on servers, as well as connectivity to remote applications.

• Load balancing
• Netscaler Gateway

Some configuration processes like disabling LB VIPs, automatically disabling the IPs used.

No stability issues. Provides great performance.

No issues other than, if you want to scale, you pay for more licenses.

Great staff. I have never had an issue with them. They’ve been helpful.

Straightforward. Simple steps to follow.

Implement it fully, utilizing all of its features.

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.

• Load balancing
• Application gateway
• SSL offloading

It helped many internal websites to expose online use with single star certificates.

Load Balancing and SSL offloading are key features.

The GUI should be improved.