Likelihood to Recommend It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Low-Cost Load Balancer Intelligent Request Routing based on URL and/or URI Extremely flexible load balancing and healthchecks, can do almost anything including HTTP, HTTPS, PostgreSQL, etc. SSL Termination Read full review 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. Read full review Cons A few, rare times each year, HAProxy CPU utilization spikes to 100% and server has to be rebooted - this may be related to HAProxy OR it could be an external factor causing this. Read full review 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. Read full review Usability It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with
Read full review Improve on the specifics I mentioned previously and could be a 10/10 product. It is also a confusingly branded product that I have supported in two large enterprises where IT departments are unsure if the product belongs to the Citrix remote access support team or the Network infrastructure support team (it should be the later) and typically under utilized.
Read full review Support Rating We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.
Read full review We chose Citrix ADC over Kemp and F5 due to additional integrations with various products such as Citrix/Horizon/Monitoring tools. We additionally chose ADC due to better ease of use and ability to have the appliances be virtual or physical, with the configuration being a simple migration of code which provided flexibility to be able to do a hybrid environment with ease.
Read full review Return on Investment Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there. Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past. Read full review It has saved a tremendous amount of money and manpower by allowing for broad support without the need for a VPN. The security functions within Netscaler enabled our business to pass additional IT-based audits. Having a full Citrix stack from front to back makes our business look more professional both to our users and outsiders. Read full review ScreenShots