NetScaler ADC Formerly Citrix ADC vs Red Hat JBoss EAP

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.

JBoss EAP is subscription based/open source platform. It's very reliable and great for deploying high transaction Java based enterprise applications. It integrates well with third party components like mod_cluster and supports popular Java EE web-based frameworks such as Spring, Angular JS, jQuery Mobile, and Google Web Toolkit.

• 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.

• MOD_CLUSTER integration. JBoss EAP integrates pretty well with mod_cluster. This is an intelligent load balancer especially useful in highly clustered environments.
• Supports enterprise-grade features such as high availability clustering, distributed caching, messaging etc.
• Supports deployment in on-premise, virtual and hybrid cloud environments.

• 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.

• Jboss CLI is a great tool but we had trouble using it to get values that are displayed on Jboss GUI. It also has limitations parsing the applications.xml files and we had to use a mix of jboss-cli and linux bash commands to automate certain application administrative tasks.
• JBoss doesn't really provides performance tuning recommendations. It would have been nice if it could learn from the current demand vs current settings for things like connection pool, server configurations, garbage collection etc.

We are planning to migrate away from Jboss to Tomcat as Jboss has shown not interest in supporting OSGi which is heavily used at our shop

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.

JBoss overall is easy to use. The installation and deployment of applications are quick. Documentations and support are also readily available.

Usually, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is good at performance and well suited for high traffic Java EE-based applications, but we have faced hard times performance tuning it for our specific needs. The product would be nicer if they would add a performance diagnostic and recommendations feature to it.

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.

Fast response.

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.

We selected JBoss because of compatibility with EJB's. We currently are trying to reduce our footprint and will highly consider using Tomcat.

• 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.

• Improved delivery timelines due to easy out of the box setup.
• It is a cheap subscription-based/open-source Java EE-based application server. This reduces the overall cost of delivery.