Citrix ADC

Formerly NetScaler ADC

The primary use case is the hosting and delivering of mission-critical web applications where multiple users need access both internally and externally. we use Citrix ADC for SSL offloads and security, secure remote access, loads balancing, and application firewall, web application firewall. We have deployed ADCs on the cloud or on-premises. Citrix ADC is less appropriate for companies that do not have any critical web applications.

Citrix ADC is well suited for a wide range of use cases. It offers very flexible options for load balancing within and across data centers. I haven't personally used every feature. I have looked into Application Firewall features which appear to be very powerful but with that comes some overhead in tuning to ensure you don't end up causing impacts to your products with a bunch of false positives.

Citrix/Netscaler ADC is well suited for any shop that plans on publishing VDI-based applications or machines from a Citrix-based environment. The strong integration between the Netscaler and the back-end Citrix infrastructure cannot be beaten when it comes to having a 99% uptime-type solution. Having a Netscaler allows shops to publish apps via the standard internet without the need of worrying about VPN or other security measures You can add a VPN on top but the basis of the Netscaler is to allow the publishing in a clientless environment outside the Citrix client itself. if your back-end VDI infrastructure is not mostly Citrix-based, the Netscaler may work for you but it will be a bit more touch and go as to compatibility and uptime.

It is more suitable for virtual desktops in the company. We provide virtual desktops for many different organisations and it gets harder to configure when all of them login through the same portal. Some of them require customisations but we try to maintain as standard image so we are not able to customise for them

If you have Citrix VDI deployment Citrix ADC is a must to be able to login remotely. Citrix Gateway works really well in that sense. It also works great for load-balancing and content switching. Its policy engine allows for almost any configuration and it can deal with any kind of traffic based on these policies and configurations.

Opening a support case with Citrix has always resulted in very attentive and professional service. They are knowledgeable and are able to diagnose and resolve issues rather quickly. This unfortunately is not the same for their "chat support" that they try to get you to use prior to opening a case. I did this once and it took way longer to explain the issue to them which resulted in having to open a support case anyway. From now on I do not bother with chat and open a support case for any issues.

From our experience with Citrix ADC, the product is a well-suited solution for application-level quality of service and quality of user experience, denial of service protection, global server load balancing, and high availability multi-node load balancing solutions, web application firewall. The product can also be utilized for SSL offloading but our organization uses a different solution for that so I can not speak to ADC usability for SSL offloading.

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.

Citrix has a knowledge center and tools to assist with support queries as well and more importantly, a relatively active community where almost any question can be answered to the best of their collective ability.

The company has been using Citrix ADC (Netscaler) for a few years now. The features are user-friendly, and what I most like is to be able to log on to my work files and apps at home or when I am out of office on business travels. We use Citrix throughout all sites of the company all over the world. Depending on the connection you are logged into the software can be slow. There are also often outages and random logouts.

Support was really helpful and showed a very good knowledge of the features. At the beginning, we used the support a lot to help us configure the features.

Citrix ADC is a must for enterprise applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Share Point, or another critical website that need to be load balanced across the network. It may not be suitable for a small business who just needs to host there own website or may not have the need for high availability.

Netscaler isn't for everyone BUT if you are deep into Citrix and rely on it as a mission-critical platform, then Netscaler can be a breath of fresh air to the sometimes slow or laggy Citrix experience (when its not peak hours, aka 8:00 am when everyone logging in) outside of that hectic time Netscaler is a great way to go. The insight you get from it and its integration with other Citrix products is well worth the cost.

Works well for remote offices with company held machines but less appropriate for access with public PC as the client needs to be installed.

Citrix is well suited for small IT shops where you need to reclaim time. Your time for user administration goes down. Citrix is very stable. Once you have it working you can usually set it and forget it. If you need failover Citrix handles it great. Just add more App Servers.

We have applications that are client-server based but we require access to them outside of our offices. The cumbersome VPN process has been overcome by delivered apps through the Citrix Receiver. It's very useful and practical; all you need now is a fast and reliable Internet connection. If that kind of flexibility is not required or other technology in place where access is given, then this may not be the best fit.

I think it is well suited for a multitude of different environments/settings/industries. It can deliver on for small, medium or large size companies. If you have a non-existent, small or large IT department in your company, Citrix will work well with all of them and all those environments.

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.

Well suited for applications such as Great Plains and Management reporter, a very intense software that you would not want to install on every machine locally. Less appropriate for small software packages or licensing such as Adobe Acrobat, etc.

The Citrix SDX and MDX models are well suited for large scale deployments with multiple load balancing needs and concurrent Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop environment. Being able to deploy the NetScaler Gateway and load balance multiple pools of specific app loads are the strengths of this platform. The SDX and MDX models would be overkill for a strict XenApp/XenDesktop deployment unless it had a huge concurrent session load with a high throughput need. The VPX model is designed for smaller XenApp/XenDesktop farms and smaller scale load balancing needs.

Citrix NetScaler is suited to any environment where hardware load-balancing, application delivery or SSL offloading is a requirement. It's a product that can be used to manipulate traffic flows in a multitude of different ways and its only limit is the protocol, application and imagination of the administrator. It's not a product that includes helpful wizards to guide the admin through each process gracefully. While it is a fairly intuitive product to use, it's not for someone who is not initiated into the ways of networking and network protocols and communication. Nor is this a product that would lend itself solely for the usage of single usage scenarios where small traffic flows would be expected (although if desired the VPX product would probably suffice in that specific scenario depending on the environment).

Our scenario is/was the defacto reason for using Netscaler.

I found the Citrix NetScaler to be a great tool with more features than we were able to get to in the healthcare industry. The reporting was also great and increased the resolution time on troubleshooting any issues.