Less appropriate: - Not best bet for startup’s as their budget is always tight - Not good for those companies where the engineers are not highly skilled otherwise the use Irules and security policies will not be utilised in optimal manner as it requires more cpu resources to work especially irules - For companies fully on cloud doesn’t best fit as I already highlighted cloud require more improvements when it comes to seamless performance Best Suited -Large enterprise companies where budget is not an issue - Companies whose traffic Rate Per Second is very high as it can handle huge RPS without latency - Companies whose business is surely depends on their availability
Citrix Netscaler can be a powerful network appliance for environments that are fully committed and open to utilizing a network appliance that isn't made by a traditional network vendor. Administrator user experience has improved over the years and will continue to improve with the flexibility of virtual and physical appliances available for medium and large enterprises.
Flexibility. NetScaler assumes its admins know a bit about networking and in-depth details surrounding the applications they are configuring access for/to. This being so, the range of configuration options is very broad allowing various versions' combinations of protocol patterns, expressions, rules etc., all to the benefit of the admin.
Granularity. Having such a broad range of configuration options available, while still allowing simple options to be configured simply. The GUI is well-stylized and navigation has a good flow.
Ease of control. For load-balancing of simple services right out of the box, NetScaler makes it pretty easy, compared to the range of options available in the surrounding GUI and under the hood.
I'd like to see better reporting capabilities on the decision-making process for DNS resolutions. Currently there are plenty of log messages for that, but I'd like to see tighter integration into the GUI.
It could be an improvement to better discriminate features intended for AA vs LDNS functionality within the GUI.
The documentation could use an overhaul with specific examples related to the command line as well as GUI. Explanations in the documentation would also be helpful.
Being able to have more than just one routing table would allow the ability to leverage security.
We use this heavily and it is one of the best products out there for this type of use case. We already have LTMs and to leverage GTM on top of that is just a piece of cake. Everything is so well integrated its amazing
Most important usability of F5 BIG-IP DNS is it’s stability which other vendors lack -As mentioned earlier as well, it’s scalability is humongous as it can honour millions of request per second without latency - irules feature makes it top and worthy to fight with top contenders like cloudflare and Cisco - Moreover it’s stable even when the Rate Per second is high and at the same time, DDos occurs - Interface is user friendly for simple tasks but requires more manual work - TAC should provide more assistance when it comes to normal support as well but they do offer professional support license for tasks which other vendor assist on normal license as well
I gave the NetScaler a 7 here because the system once configured and deployed is very easy to use. However, if you did not deploy the system and do not have the fundamental background knowledge then you will have trouble using the product in general. Overall it is a great product and service but does typically require professional services to be deployed.
Overall, our organization's experience with Citrix support is that support can be hit or miss. Oftentimes it takes multiple attempts and much longer than desirable to obtain a viable solution for issues experienced with their products. It would be great to see Citrix invest time, effort, and almighty dollars into improving their support and bug fix process across the board.
As I mentioned, the GSLB capability, being able to do intelligent DNS by having access to monitor specific endpoints associated to my current BIG-IP infrastructure, I believe that brings a huge value, then combine fast responses and security.
easy to use and setup and reliable. Once the configuration was setup and running this has been really useful and easy to maintain. The other solutions seemed overly complicated and difficult to configure and get up and running with the security that we required
Saved almost 1.2 million USD for one of critical activities as downtime could have posed this but due to failover based on health checks saved these bucks
Business impact which can be caused due to DDos attacks avoided
High cost licensing as mentioned earlier as well
Analytical limitations as F5 has also mentioned multiple it’s not an analytical tool
We had this set up before COVID and it saved us. We just added user licenses and scaled out our citrix farm and IT sat back and just monitored users from home.
Scales up and out with ease
Challenging to find NetScaler experts for advanced features you want to enable and use
